Continuously-Adaptive Haptic Rendering

Haptic display with force feedback is often necessary in several virtual environments. To enable haptic rendering of large datasets we introduce Continuously-Adaptive Haptic Rendering, a novel approach to reduce the complexity of the rendered dataset. We construct a continuous, multiresolution hierarchy of the model during the pre-processing and then at run time we use high-detail representation for regions around the probe pointer and coarser representation farther away. We achieve this by using a bell-shaped filter centered at the position of the probe pointer. Using our algorithm we are able to haptically render one to two orders of magnitude larger datasets than otherwise possible. Our approach is orthogonal to the previous work done in accelerating haptic rendering and thus can be used with them.