Implementing Haptic Feedback Environments from High-Level Descriptions

Haptic feedback can be a critical component of virtual environments used in cognitive research, rehabilitation, military training, and entertainment. A limiting factor in the innovation and the acceptance of virtual environments with haptic feedback is the time and cost required to build them. This paper presents a development environment called iAcumen that supports a new approach for programming such systems. This approach allows the developer to directly express physical equations describing the underlying dynamics. By raising the level of abstraction for the developer, we avoid many of the problems that limit the effectiveness of traditional approaches.