A new article in The Engineer explains how researchers at Queen's University, Belfast, are making strides toward developing technology that will bring the sense of touch to virtual worlds. According to the article, a new study in the field of haptic technology makes feasible a future where shoppers can feel the products they want to buy online, or get a sense of force when the ball hits the racquet in a digital tennis game.

The researchers will spend the next three years working on the network architecture needed to support such technology. Specifically, they need to find a way to compensate for network delays that affect the quality of haptic performance -- in other words, the sense of the ball hitting the racquet might be delayed on a slow network connection.

Professor Alan Marshall, the principal investigator of the project, says that haptics can cause an even greater delay than the approximately 50 milliseconds associated with voice. "We know that when we put echo cancelling on voice it can reduce delay time, so what we need to do is to develop the equivalent of an echo canceller for haptics," he explains.

Marshall explains that the stereoscopic images used to create 3D worlds are actually ideal for haptic technology, because they create the dimension of depth essential to touch -- which has exciting implications for adding another of the real human five senses to virtual environments.