For a long time, human beings have dreamed of a virtual world where it is possible to interact with synthetic entities as if they were real. It has been shown that the ability to touch virtual objects increases the sense of presence in virtual environments. This book provides an authoritative overview of state-of-theart haptic rendering algorithms

There has been significant progress in haptic technologies but the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the new society's human activities including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce and science would forever change if we learned how to capture, manipulate and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move forward, many commercial and technological barriers need to be overcome. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information that might reflect a desire to speak a physically- based language that has never been explored before. Due to constant improvement in haptics technology and increasing levels of research into and development of haptics-related algorithms, protocols and devices, there is a belief that haptics technology has a promising future.

The human haptic system, among all senses, provides unique and bidirectional communication between humans and their physical environment. Yet, to date, most human-computer interactive systems have focused primarily on the graphical rendering of visual information and, to a lesser extent, on the display of auditory information. Extending the frontier of visual computing, haptic interfaces, or force feedback devices, have the potential to increase the quality of human-computer interaction by accommodating the sense of touch. They provide an attractive augmentation to visual display and enhance the level of understanding of complex data sets. They have been effectively used for a number of applications including molecular docking, manipulation of nano-materials, surgical training, virtual prototyping, and digital sculpting. Compared with visual and auditory display, haptic rendering has extremely demanding computational requirements. In order to maintain a stable system while displaying smooth and realistic forces and torques, high haptic update rates in the range of 5001000 Hz or more are typically used. Haptics present many new challenges to researchers and developers in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Some of the critical issues include the development of novel data structures to encode shape and material properties, as well as new techniques for geometry processing, data analysis, physical modeling, and haptic visualization. This synthesis examines some of the latest developments on haptic rendering, while looking forward to exciting future research in this area. It presents novel haptic rendering algorithms that take advantage of the human haptic sensory modality. Specifically it discusses different rendering techniques for various geometric representations (e.g. point-based, polygonal, multiresolution, distance fields, etc), as well as textured surfaces.

The term “haptics” refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community. This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments. Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

This book introduces the latest progress in six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) haptic rendering with the focus on a new approach for simulating force/torque feedback in performing tasks that require dexterous manipulation skills. One of the major challenges in 6-DoF haptic rendering is to resolve the conflict between high speed and high fidelity requirements, especially in simulating a tool interacting with both rigid and deformable objects in a narrow space and with fine features. The book presents a configuration-based optimization approach to tackle this challenge. Addressing a key issue in many VR-based simulation systems, the book will be of particular interest to researchers and professionals in the areas of surgical simulation, rehabilitation, virtual assembly, and inspection and maintenance.

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.

The two-volume set LNCS 9774 and 9775 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference EuroHaptics 2016, held in London, UK, in July 2016. The 100 papers (36 oral presentations and 64 poster presentations) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 submissions. These proceedings reflect the multidisciplinary nature of EuroHaptics and cover topics such as perception of hardness and softness; haptic devices; haptics and motor control; tactile cues; control of haptic interfaces; thermal perception; robotics and sensing; applications.