Feeling a Crisp and Rigid Virtual World through an Impulsive Encountered-type Haptic Display

摘要

The realism of the haptic experience when interacting with a virtual reality environment is restricted by several factors. The quality of the haptic hardware that is used forms, for obvious reasons, an important factor. Nowadays' hardware experiences notably problems in rendering contacts with rigid virtual objects realistically. This abstract introduces a method with good potential to display rigid contacts more realistic than before. The method renders contacts by carefully controlling the impulses exchanged at the instant of contact. The proposed device behaves as an 'encountered-type' device that only encounters the human hand during contacts, while leaving motion in free space completely undisturbed. At the same time it allows a precise control of the perceived 'impulse' upon contact by employing the paradigm of an earlier described impulsive haptic display system. The basic control rules of this new approach are explained, some initial experiments are included and directions for future work are described.