Towards Tangible Images and Video in Cyberworlds--Function-Based Approach

Haptic interaction is commonly used with 3D objects defined by their geometric and solid models. Extension of the haptic interaction to 3D Cyber worlds is a challenging task due to the Internet bandwidth constraints and often prohibitive sizes of the models. We study how to replace visual and haptic rendering of shared 3D objects with 2D image visualization and 3D haptic rendering of the forces reconstructed from the images or augmenting them, which will eventually simulate realistic haptic interaction with 3D objects. This approach allows us to redistribute the computing power so that it can concentrate mainly on the tasks of haptic interaction and rendering. We propose how to implement such interaction with small function descriptions of the haptic information augmenting images and video. We illustrate the proposed ideas with the function-based extension of VRML and X3D.