Implementation of a virtual tennis entertainment system with haptic behaviour

For most of the virtual reality systems, one of the major aims is to provide a vivid interaction platform between the human operators and the haptic devices. Through the user interface, a skilful operator can control the haptic devices to accomplish relatively complicated jobs in real-time. Generally, the main components of a virtual reality system include dynamic simulations, haptic devices and the user interface, which is composed of virtual environments and visual equipment. This study focuses on developing a virtual tennis entertainment system with haptic behaviour. A parallel-type robot and a serial-type robot are employed as the haptic device handlers in this study, in which they are controlled directly by the operator's arm through the user interface. The operator can sense the change in virtual environment provided by dynamic simulations. In addition, the human operator can 'see' the change of environment during operation in real-time through the screen. A virtual spring model and a virtual damper model were constructed to simulate the process of tennis playing in this study. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed virtual tennis entertainment system.