Haptic interaction with virtual objects: the technology and some applications

Haptics is an emerging technology that allows touch‐enabled interaction with virtual objects. Analogous to the use of computer graphics for rendering of a three‐dimensional (3D) scene to give the user a visual description of the scene, it is possible to use computer haptics to let the user touch objects in the 3D scene. This is normally accomplished by having the haptics engine sending either force vectors or positional information to a haptics device, a robotic arm, that the user manipulates. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of this technology, describe haptic devices and haptic application programming interfaces. We will also illustrate the use of haptics technology by describing a few industrial and medical applications.