Synchronization between audiovisual and haptic feeling for constructing edutainment systems

Virtual reality (VR) technology has become more and more mature over the last decade. Development of a virtual environment for training purpose is considered to be one of the most practical applications of the VR technology. Since the VR technology involves all kinds of sensors in exchanging information between the real world and the virtual environment, it is computationally intensive in terms of data processing at an individual sensor and information integration among all the sensors. In general, the information integration has to be well synchronized in order to meet the training needs. At the same time, real-time processing capability is also considered to be critical. Many more practical issues could be uncovered only when a virtual training environment is actually being developed. Based on this belief, this study experiments on the development of a virtual environment for training billiards players. The technical difficulties encountered and the corresponding resolutions are considered beneficial to the development of other practical virtual training environments. This paper summarizes the design and implementation details about our experimental virtual training environment for edutainment systems such as virtual billiard game, virtual air hockey game and virtual drum performance with the algorithms for the synchronization of the information from different sources.