In a multi-user distributed haptic virtual environment (DHVE), object state update messages are necessary to maintain a consistent virtual environment at every entity involved. Traffic control schemes applied to reduce the usually high number of update packets lead to inconsistencies among the participants. Whenever a new state update is received, the discrepancy between the old and new object state has to be resolved. For this purpose, various interpolation methods can be used to smoothly

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... ct the state error. In this paper, we investigate and compare three such methods using subjective experiments to determine a haptically preferred method that leads to a convincing force feedback. Besides basic linear interpolation, we test two other methods from literature which are based on cubic polynomials. Our experimental evaluation, based on a pursuit-tracking task and pairwise comparisons, shows that linear interpolation performs better than the two cubic approaches and is subjectively preferred.