Touch in Virtual Environments

Book excerpt: Haptics: The state-of-the-art in building touch-based interfaces for virtual environments. -- Key research issues: model acquisition, contact detection, force feedback, compression, capture, and collaboration. -- Understanding the role of human factors in haptic interfaces. -- Applications: medical training, telesurgery, biological and scientific interfaces, military applications, sign language, museum display, and more. Haptics -- "touch-based" interface design -- is the exciting new frontier in research on virtual and immersive environments. In Touch in Virtual Environments, the field's leading researchers bring together their most advanced work and applications. They identify the key challenges facing haptic interface developers, present today's best solutions, and outline a clear research agenda for the future. This book draws upon work first presented at the breakthrough haptics conference held recently at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center. The editors and contributors begins by reviewing key haptics applications and the challenges of effective haptic rendering, presenting new insights into model acquisition, contact detection, force feedback, compression, capture, collaboration, and other key issues. Next, they focus on the complex human factors associated with successful haptic interfaces, examining questions such as: How can we make haptic displays more usable for blind and visually impaired users? What are the differences between perceiving texture with the bare skin and with a probe? In the book's final section, several of today's leading haptic applications are introduced, including telesurgery and surgical simulation; scientific visualization.