VISUALIZATION: High Fidelity Virtual Touch: Algorithms, Applications and Evaluation

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Force feedback devices, or haptic interfaces, have the potential to increase the qualityof human-computer interaction by adding the sense of touch. However, there are still few practical force feedback applications, due in large part to the stringent computational requirements of haptic rendering. In order to maintain a high fidelity system, haptic update rates must be as high as 1000 Hz, rather than the 30 Hz updates for graphical displays. This is especially challenging for 6-degree of freedom (DOF) haptic devices which are used to display forces and torques for arbitrary pairs of objects. This requires accurate contact determination and contact force and torque computation of all collision points in less than a millisecond.This project focuses on three aspects of high fidelity haptic display or ''virtual touch''. The first goal includes developing new geometric and physically-based algorithms that can improve the state of the art by more than an order of magnitude, in addition to the expected improvements in processor speed and computing power over that time. This will be based on hybrid spatial data structures, simplification hierarchies, multi-resolution representations, bounded error approximations, and massively parallel rasterization hardware. The second goal is to pursue applications that can benefit significantly from the use of high-fidelity 6-DOF haptic displays. This includes virtual prototyping of nano-structures, haptic visualization of biological interaction between molecules, maintenance analysis and interactive modeling and painting. The third goal is the evaluation of 6-DOF haptic rendering systems as a tool for human-computer interface. This will be done in collaboration with Boeing, Sandia Labs, and Sensable Technologies. If successful, the proposed research will provide enabling algorithms and a prototype software system for designing a high-fidelity virtual touch system.