An Event Architecture for Distributed Interactive Multisensory Rendering

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.