Haptic rendering of volume data with collision detection guarantee using path finding

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel haptic rendering method for exploration of volumetric data. It addresses a recurring flaw in almost all related approaches, where the manipulated object, when moved too quickly, can go through or inside an obstacle. Additionally, either a specific topological structure for the collision objects is needed, or extra speed-up data structures should be prepared. These issues could make it difficult to use a method in practice. Our approach was designed to be free of such drawbacks. An improved version of the method presented here does not have the issues of the original method - oscillations of the interaction point and wrong friction force in some cases. It uses the ray casting technique for collision detection and a path finding approach for rigid collision response. The method operates directly on voxel data and does not use any precalculated structures, but uses an implicit surface representation being generated on the fly. This means that a virtual scene may be both dynamic or static. Additionally, the presented approach has a nearly constant time complexity independent of data resolution. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.