Building the Foundation for a Modern Tactile Internet Testbed

Abstract

Tactile Internet opens many new possibilities as it solves one of the critical problems in the modern-day Internet, namely latency. Remote operations are possible that are deemed too dangerous with current technologies. Interacting directly with the remote environment without being physically present will be a life-changing experience. Before building the Tactile Internet infrastructure, continued research is necessary for haptic technology and networking. A modern Tactile Internet testbed is needed for researchers to conduct studies. The testbed uses Unity with Bullet Physics as an external physics engine and includes network possibilities and basic 3D tracking. Latency analysis shows a relation between the physics engine execution time and the scene's complexity. The testbed can handle many objects in the environment if continuous interactions among objects are limited. Force feedback analysis shows the expected behavior for the virtual spring implementation.