XML-based representation of haptic information

The ongoing research on haptics has produced excellent results that have paved the way to a whole new field of multimedia. Creating the sense of "touch", along with all its derivatives is very appealing indeed. Whether it is in gaming, tele-surgery simulations, rehabilitation, entertainment, or in the realm of military applications, concerned users seem to have obtained an acquired taste of this haptic world. However, the lack of haptic information representation formats is an impediment to the development of haptic applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to represent haptic information. Six basic categories are defined to describe the haptic application model with an explanation on why these categories and their parameters need to be defined.