Effect of Adaptive Reaction Force Control on Human Perception of Softness with Haptic Sense in Networked Virtual Environment

In this paper, we examine the effect of adaptive reaction force control on human perception of softness with haptic sense in a networked virtual environment by Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment in which we use a networked haptic balloon bursting game. To maintain the consistency of the game states between terminals, we produce the local lag, which is set to the network delay, at each terminal; however, as the local lag increases, the softness of balloon becomes harder. The adaptive reaction force control solves the problem by changing the elastic coefficient according to the local lag. Assessment results demonstrate that the adaptive reaction force control can keep the human perception of softness constant for a wide range of the local lag.