Virtual Hair Handle: A Model for Haptic Hairstyling

The process of styling virtual hair is a tedious task for 3D artists, who would significantly profit from more natural and intuitive ways of creating virtual hairstyles such as, for example, the possibility to simply comb virtual hair using a haptic device. However, despite significant advances in hair simulation during the last decades, physically based haptic interaction with hair is still an unresolved problem. In this paper, we propose a real-time simulation framework allowing to interactively style virtual hair and feel a force-feedback through a haptic device. Unlike previous approaches, we adapt our hair simulation model to fulfil the requirements of haptic interaction. Our model reproduces, on a physical basis, hair behaviour and interaction forces arising when touching hair.