Haptic rendering - beyond visual computing - Toward realistic haptic rendering of surface textures

Seungmoon Choi, Hong Z. Tan
2004 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications  
T he emerging science of haptic rendering consists of delivering properties of physical objects through the sense of touch. Owing to the recent development of sophisticated haptic-rendering algorithms, users can now experience virtual objects through touch in many exciting applications, including surgical simulations, virtual prototyping, and data perceptualization. Haptics holds great promise to enrich the sensory attributes of virtual objects that these systems can produce. One area that has
more » ... eceived increasing attention in the haptics community is haptic texture rendering, the goal of which is to introduce microgeometry-scale features on object surfaces. Haptic objects rendered without textures usually feel smooth, and sometimes slippery. Appropriate haptic textures superimposed on haptic objects enhance an object's realism. For example, we can make the same cubic structure feel like a brick with rough surface textures or a cardboard carton with finer textures. Clearly, haptic texture rendering is an exciting research field that can take haptic rendering to the next level. Although much effort has been devoted to haptic texture rendering-mostly in modeling and rendering techniques 1,2 -the research community must overcome many challenges before haptic texture rendering can be widely used in real applications. One common problem in haptically rendered textures is that they are sometimes perceived to behave unrealistically, for example, by buzzing or by the apparent aliveness of a textured surface. Due to the complex nature of the haptic-rendering pipeline and the human somatosensory system, it remains a difficult problem to expose all factors contributing to such perceptual artifacts. At the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory at Purdue University, we are among the first to have systematically investigated the unrealistic behavior of virtual haptic textures. This article presents a summary of our recent work in this area. We hope this article will stimulate further discussion among haptics researchers and applications developers who are interested in haptic texture rendering.
doi:10.1109/mcg.2004.1274060 pmid:15387227 fatcat:wqkhvpa4vbgm7gddbvzrclruhi