Touch in Virtual Environments and Haptics

Citation

Rigelsford, J. (2004), "Touch in Virtual Environments and Haptics", Sensor Review, Vol. 24 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sr.2004.08724aae.002

Touch in Virtual Environments and Haptics

Touch in Virtual Environments and Haptics

M.L. McLaughlin, J.P. Hespanha and G.S. SukhatmePrentice Hall2002278 pp.ISBN 0-13-065097-8£70.99 Hardback

Keywords: Haptics

This book provides up-to-date coverage of the rapidly emerging fields of haptics and the design of interactive systems. It explores basic research issues in haptics, including the acquisition of models, contact detection, force feedback, data compression and human factors, and presents application areas for haptics, such as telesurgery and scientific visualisation.

The first eight chapters of the book address the haptic interface. After an “Introduction to Haptics”, chapter 2 discusses “Simulation with Contact for Haptic Interaction”. Topics presented include haptic rendering, dynamic motion models, contact space, impulse- and contact-force resolution, and combining haptic and dynamic environments. Control of haptics using time domain definition of passivity, implementation issues for stable high performance control, enhanced displacement resolution, and torque ripple elimination, are amongst the topics discussed in the following two chapters – “Stable Control of Haptics, and Hardware for Improved Haptic Interface Performance”. “Six-Degrees-of-Freedom Haptic Visualization”, “ND Lossy Compression of Haptic Data” are presented in chapters 5 and 6, respectively, while chapters 7 and 8 address “A Robust System for Haptic Collaboration over the Network”, and “Haptic Collaboration over the Internet”. Topics discussed include: haptic rendering of polygonal objects, 6-degree-of-freedom haptic visualisation of volumetric data-sets, low-delay predictive coding, model-based coding, a proposal for a haptic communication system, and a virtual haptic world.

Chapters 9-12 address the unpredictable human aspect of haptics. They discuss “Perceiving Complex Virtual Scenes without Visual Guidance, Perceiving Texture through a Probe”, “Haptic and Auditory Display in Multimodal Information Systems”, and “Detection Thresholds for Small Haptic Effects”, respectively.

The remaining three chapters of the book provide application areas for haptics. Chapter 13, “Haptic Interfaces to Real and Virtual Surgical Environments”, presents the UC Berkley/UC San Francisco robotic telesurgical system and a training simulator for minimally invasive surgery, while chapter 14 discusses “Understanding of User Behaviour in Immersive Environments”. The final chapter presents “A Haptic Exhibition of Daguerreotype Cases for USC's Fisher Gallery”.

“Touch in Virtual Environments” is a well written reference text that will be of interest to engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists who are involved in haptics research.