Volume Haptics with Topology-Consistent Isosurfaces

Haptic interfaces offer an intuitive way to interact with and manipulate 3D datasets, and may simplify the interpretation of visual information. This work proposes an algorithm to provide haptic feedback directly from volumetric datasets, as an aid to regular visualization. The haptic rendering algorithm lets users perceive isosurfaces in volumetric datasets, and it relies on several design features that ensure a robust and efficient rendering. A marching tetrahedra approach enables the dynamic extraction of a piecewise linear continuous isosurface. Robustness is achieved using a continuous collision detection step coupled with state-of-the-art proxy-based rendering methods over the extracted isosurface. The introduced marching tetrahedra approach guarantees that the extracted isosurface will match the topology of an equivalent isosurface computed using trilinear interpolation. The proposed haptic rendering algorithm improves the consistency between haptic and visual cues computing a second proxy on the isosurface displayed on screen. Our experiments demonstrate the improvements on the isosurface extraction stage as well as the robustness and the efficiency of the complete algorithm.