Haptic Rendering is where one use a force-feedback device consisting of motors and angular sensors to generate forces that a user can sense.

To achieve this, the haptic loop, the loop which is controlling the motors is run at approx. 1000hz.

Haptics is used today in many different areas such as modelling, mechanical engineering, visualization but mainly in the medical area, where one wants to touch Volumetric data from tomography, or practice different surgical tasks.

This project will start from two different existing libraries, Haptiks - which is a low-level library that is used to communicate with the haptic device, and osgHaptics (developed at VRlab) , which is a high-level library that is used to model haptic environments integrated in a scenegraph, OpenSceneGraph.

Today, the comercially available library OpenHaptics from Sensable Inc. is used internally in osgHaptics. We want to see how far we can take the haptic rendering when it comes to multipoint proxy contacts, haptic textures, interaction with interactive particle systems.

What is needed for this library is a clear and consistent design of a framework for point/mesh collisiondetection, stable force rendering, bump force-texturing.

This project is suitable for 2 students á 20 credit points.

If you are interested, contact Anders Backman at VRlab.