A Haptic Modeling System

Abstract

Haptics has been studied as a means of providing users with natural and immersive haptic sensations in various real, augmented, and virtual environments, but it is still relatively unfamiliar to the general public. One reason is the lack of abundant haptic content in areas familiar to the general public. Even though some modeling tools do exist for creating haptic content, the addition of haptic data to graphic models is still relatively primitive, time consuming, and unintuitive. In order to establish a comprehensive and efficient haptic modeling system, this chapter first defines the haptic modeling processes and its scopes. It then proposes a haptic modeling system that can, based on depth images and image data structure, create and edit haptic content easily and intuitively for virtual object. This system can also efficiently handle non-uniform haptic property per pixel, and can effectively represent diverse haptic properties (stiffness, friction, etc).