We describe an architecture for coping with latency and asynchrony of multisensory events in interactive virtual environments. We propose to decompose multisensory interactions into a series of discrete, perceptually significant events, and structure the application architecture within this event-based context. We analyze the sources of latency, and develop a framework for event prediction and scheduling. Our framework decouples synchronization from latency, and uses prediction to reduce latency when possible. We evaluate the performance of the architecture using vision-based motion sensing and multisensory rendering using haptics, sounds, and graphics. The architecture makes it easy to achieve good performance using commodity off-the-shelf hardware.
Timothy Edmunds, Dinesh K. Pai