Haptic Battle Pong: High-Degree-of-Freedom Haptics in a Multiplayer Gaming Environment

Recent advances in both haptic rendering techniques and CPU power have made haptic feedback increasingly accessible on consumer hardware. With the recent success of simple haptic feedback devices in console and PC game systems, more sophisticated haptic rendering is poised to enter the mass entertainment market in the near future. With this in mind, we describe “Haptic Battle Pong”, a competitive networked game that makes extensive use of three-degree-of-freedom force-feedback and six-degree-of-freedom input. This is among the first games to fully utilize the capabilities of high-fidelity haptic devices, and we use this environment to explore the applicability of high-degreeof-freedom haptics to games. We discuss our approaches to physical simulation, forcerendering, and networked haptic interaction.

We also discuss several techniques we used to enhance the entertainment value of a traditional video game using the capabilities of a haptic display. Finally, we review the subjective responses of initial users and several lessons we learned that may be applied to future haptic games.