SRENG Contribution to the study of visual , auditory and haptic rendering of information of contact in virtual environments

Virtual Reality technologies are increasingly used in numerous domains. In industrial applicationsfor instance, virtual prototyping enables engineers to interactively test if one part can be assembledinto another. In such simulations, the contact between virtual objects is an essential notion as ittightly governs the movement of objects, constraining their trajectory with respect to their directsurrounding. The contact helps the user to understand the interaction between geometries, notablythrough interactive manipulation.Providing information of contact in virtual environments raises many challenges, for instance dueto the growing complexity of simulated scenes. In this thesis, we propose to investigate multimodal(visual, auditory and haptic) rendering techniques focused on the contact information in virtual envi-ronments.First, we propose an integrated approach for multimodal rendering of information of contact in6DOF manipulations. We present a generic formulation independent from the underlying simula-tion. Then, we introduce a multimodal rendering architecture delivering visual, auditory, tactile andkinesthetic feedback of contact.Next, we further investigate the specific issue raised by complex shaped objects. The multiplecontacts generated by the interactive manipulation of such objects are difficult to perceive. We proposeto address this issue by providing the position information associated to each contact.Thus, we first present and evaluate a visual rendering technique based on glyph and light effectsto provide information of contact in situations of multiple contacts between objects.Then, we introduce a haptic rendering technique based on high-frequency vibrations to convey theimpact position information. A 1DOF haptic case study based on a vibrating beam is first presentedand experimented. Then, we generalize this approach by presenting a spatialized haptic renderingtechnique for 6DOF manipulation. Two experiments are presented to optimize the rendering param-eters of spatialized haptic rendering and provide subjective evaluation.