Haptic Interactions in the Real and Virtual Worlds

In humans or machines, haptics refers to the use of hands for manual sensing and manipulation. Recently, haptic machines that enable the user to touch, feel, and manipulate virtual environments have generated considerable excitement. Synthesizing virtual haptic objects requires an optimal balance between the human haptic ability to sense object properties, computational complexity to render them in real time, and fidelity of the device in delivering the computed mechanical signals. In this paper, we primarily describe the progress made in our “MIT Touch Lab” over the past few years concerning the development of haptic machines, the paradigms and algorithms used in the emerging field of “Computer Haptics” (analogous to Computer Graphics), and experimental results on human perception and performance in multimodal virtual environments. Several ongoing applications such as the development of a surgical simulator and virtual environments shared by multiple users are also described.