Event-Based Haptics and Acceleration Matching: Portraying and Assessing the Realism of Contact

Contact in a typical haptic environment resembles the experience of tapping on soft foam, rather than on a hard object. Event-based, high-frequency transient forces must be superimposed with traditional proportional feedback to provide realistic haptic cues at impact. We have developed a new method for matching the accelerations experienced during real contact, inverting a dynamic model of the device to compute appropriate force feedback transients. We evaluated this haptic rendering paradigm by conducting a study in which users blindly rated the realism of tapping on a variety of virtually rendered surfaces as well as on three real objects. Event-based feedback significantly increased the realism of the virtual surfaces, and the acceleration matching strategy was rated similarly to a sample of real wood on a foam substrate. This work provides a new avenue for achieving realism of contact in haptic interactions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: HAPTICS
• Authors: Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Jonathan Fiene, Günter Niemeyer
• Keywords: Haptic Rendering Paradigm, HAPTICS 2005, Realistic Haptic Cues, Typical Haptic Environment, Virtual Reality