ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates a preliminary prototype exploring the aforesaid haptic interactions between virtual and real environment actors. It examines the various components of the system that facilitates the Second Life based interpersonal communication and provides a general overview of the system and its access mechanisms. The chapter describes the implementation issues and development challenges of different modules. It presents response time comparisons for different haptic and animation data, accuracy of different interaction modalities and user study of the system. The chapter shows the avatar animations and explains the associated haptic signal patterns. The haptic-based nonverbal modality can enhance social interactivity and emotional immersive experiences in a three-dimensional (3D) multiuser virtual world that presents a 3D realistic environment, where people can enrol in an online virtual community. Interactivity, multimodality and haptic interaction play an important role in creating a vivid telepresence experience into the participating users.
