A Haptic-based Interface and Sculpting System for Virtual Environments

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This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Computer-integrated engineering design consists of a variety of complex and challenging processes, ranging from conceptual design, geometric modeling, evaluation, prototyping, manufacturing, assembly, to production. To ameliorate CAD/CAM processes, as well as to revolutionize human-computer interaction technology, the PIs will develop an interactive and tangible virtual environment to advance the current state-of-the-art through the novel integration of dynamic modeling and real-time haptic sculpting. To these ends, they will focus on critical fundamental issues relating to the rapid and accurate synchronization of multiple heterogeneous representations of geometric primitives and physical properties of virtual material in a software environment, including optimal algorithms and their time/space analysis, and numerical characteristics such as stability, robustness, and error bounds. They will investigate haptic interaction techniques towards the next-generation design technology in a systematic way through the development of novel haptic sculpting toolkits and the evaluation of both toolkit utilities and human factors. Finally, they will investigate the effective integration of haptic principles with mature geometric design techniques and develop an experimental virtual environment with haptic interface and real-time haptic sculpting capabilities. The PIs will disseminate the novel haptic technology and its software to the U.S. design industry and computer enterprises. To further broaden the accessibility of the new haptic technology in engineering, sciences, and medicine, the PIs will make extra efforts (through extensive collaborations) towards generalizing their prototype software system to other haptics-relevant applications such as surgical simulation and training, and haptic visualization of large scientific data sets, as time allows.