Haptics Issues in Virtual Environments

Haptics is a recent enhancement to virtual environments allowing users to “touch” and feel the simulated objects they interact with. Current commercial products allow tactile feedback through desktop interfaces (such as the FEELIt mouse or the PHANToM arm) and dextrous tactile and force feedback at the fingertips through haptic gloves (such as the CyberTouch and the CyberGrasp). Haptics VR programming requires good physical modeling of user interactions, primarily through collision detection, and of object response, such as surface deformation, hard-contact simulation, slippage, etc. It is at present difficult to simulate complex virtual environments that have a realistic behavior. This task is added by the recent introduction of haptic toolkits (such