Haptic interfaces in generic virtual reality systems

Presents an approach to implementing haptic interfaces in generic virtual reality systems. Typical implementations of virtual environment simulations with haptic rendering conceive the haptic interface intrinsically linked to the virtual scene update. In this framework, the haptic feedback estimation depends on the methods used to simulate the virtual scene and the haptic feedback rate depends on the scene update rate. This dependence ties the development of the simulation system and strongly limits the complexity of simulated scenes due to the high feedback rate (~1 KHz) demanded by a realistic haptic rendering. We propose a new structure to systems having a haptic interface, decoupling the haptic rendering from the virtual environment simulation and introducing a “buffer model” between them. We successfully applied this approach to interface a deformable objects simulator with a Phantom haptic device