Recently, the IEEE P1918.1 standardization activity has been initiated for defining a framework for the Tactile Internet. Within this activity, IEEE P1918.1.1 is a task group for the standardization of Haptic Codecs for the Tactile Internet. Primary goal of the task group is to define/develop codecs for both closed-loop (kinesthetic information exchange) and open-loop (tactile information exchange) communications. In this paper, we propose a reference hardware and software setup for the evaluation of kinesthetic codecs. The setup defines a typical teleoperation scenario in a virtual environment for the realization of closed-loop kinesthetic interactions. For the installation and testing of the setup, we provide detailed guidelines in the paper. The paper also provides sample data traces for both static and dynamic kinesthetic interactions. These data traces may be used for preliminary testing of kinesthetic codecs. The paper also provides links for the download of both the reference setup and the data traces. © 2017 IEEE.