Touch in Virtual Environments : Haptics and the Design of Interactive Systems (2001)

From the Book:
Preface
The haptic interface is becoming an increasingly important component of immersive systems. Haptics refers to the modality of touch and the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring a virtual object, such as a three-dimensional model of a tool, instrument, or art object. Researchers in the field are interested in developing, refining, and testing haptic devices and interfaces, and applying findings from psychological studies of human touch to the simulation of the tactile sense in virtual environments. Touch in Virtual Environments: Haptics and the Design of Interactive Systems is an outgrowth of a one-day conference on haptics held at the University of Southern California in February, 2001, sponsored by USC's Integrated Media Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, and the IEEE Control Systems Society. Many of the chapters were first presented as papers at that venue. The contributors to this volume, who represent a variety of academic disciplines and institutional affiliations, are researchers who can fairly be said to be working at the cutting edge of engineering science, in an area that is just beginning to have an impact in the design of immersive systems.

In Chapters 1-8 of this book, the contributors ponder questions about the haptic interface, such as: How can current state-of-the-art haptic displays be improved via better sensing? What are the software tools and models needed to facilitate multi-user tactile exploration of shared virtual environments? How can we optimize low-level force control for haptic devices? What algorithms andtechniques are needed to convey the feel of deformable objects? How do we capture users' exploration with haptic devices? How do we compress haptic exploration data so that it becomes possible to store or transmit long interactive sessions? In Chapters 9-12, the contributors consider the impact of the unpredictable, and highly variable, human-in-the-loop. They examine questions like the following: 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, and how do factors like probe size and speed contribute? What can we learn about human thresholds for detecting small haptic effects that will be useful for the design of hand-held devices? To what extent do vision, sound, and haptics complement or interfere with one another in multimodal interactive systems?

In addition to exploring basic research issues in haptics such as acquisition of models, contact detection, force feedback, compression, capture, collaboration, and human factors, the contributors to Touch in Virtual Environments describe in detail several promising applications. A primary application area for haptics has been in surgical simulation and medical training. Haptics has also been incorporated into scientific visualization, providing an intuitive interface to complex displays of biological and geoscientific data. In some projects haptic displays have been used as alternative input devices for painting, sculpting and computer-assisted design. There have also been instances of the application of haptics to military training and simulation, providing an accurate source of orientation information in land, sea, and aerospace environments. In Chapters 13-15 the reader will find accounts of applications to telesurgery and surgical simulation, sign language recognition, and museum display.