Today, the existing computer-aided design and manufacturing systems provide limited touch feedback to the user. However, recent advances in haptic interfaces and rendering algorithms now enable us to simulate high fidelity touch interactions in virtual environments. We believe that product engineers and designers can significantly benefit from these recent developments. This tutorial will focus on the haptic rendering techniques that enable the use to touch, feel, and manipulate 3D objects in virtual environments and the applications of this technology to computer-aided design and manufacturing for rapid prototyping. This tutorial will be structured into three sections as follows.
Reality is different.
Actual inputs are frequently not in general position and floating point arithmetic is a poor approximation of real numbers and hence it is not surprising that implementers of geometric algorithms have a hard time. This course will address issues in designing and building systems for interactive walkthroughs of large geometric datasets including architectural buildings and mechanical CAD models like submarines and power- plants. We will also address a number of issues in implementing and integrating these techniques and applying them to real-world models. Finally, we will address issues in creating effective walkthrough illusions and discuss their applications. In the first part, we describe the architecture of a simple planar constraint solver anyone can implement.