Haptesha - A Collaborative Multi-User Haptic Workspace
Haptic feedback is an essential and emerging technology for many
applications, ranging from virtual assembly simulation to mobile computing.
It can help
to improve human-computer interaction as well as, in multi-user scenarios,
human-human interactions in many fields like industrial applications,
entertainment, education, medicine and arts.
We present a haptic workspace that allows high fidelity two-handed
multi-user interactions in scenarios containing a large number of
dynamically simulated rigid objects and a polygon count that is
only limited by the capabilities of the graphics card.
The main challenge when doing haptic rendering is the extremely
high frequency that is required: While the temporal resolution of
the human eye is limited to approximately 30 Hz, the bandwidth of
the human tactile system is about 1000 Hz. In most haptic scenarios,
the computational bottleneck remains the collision detection,
whereas the force computation can be done relatively fast.
Thus, the heart of our haptic workspace is our new geometric data
structure, called Inner Sphere Trees (ISTs), that not only allows us
to detect collisions between pairs of massive objects at haptic rates
but also enables us to define a novel type of contact information that
guarantees stable forces and torques.
For further informations about ISTs please visit our project website.
Picture of our Haptic Workspace
Our haptic workspace set up for two users and four Novint Falcons.
Haptesha - The Game
Based on our haptic workspace we have developed a haptic multiplayer
game that requires from the players complex bi-manual
interactions simultaneously in the same environment. Besides a
user survey, we included several mechanisms to track the quality
of the users actions in the game for a quantitative and qualitative
analysis.
The results show that 6-DOF force-feedback
devices outperform 3-DOF devices significantly, both
in user perception and in user performance.
The two-player set up with four haptic devices for our user study (Left). The playing field of our haptic game (Right).
Haptesha: A Collaborative Multi-User Haptic Workspace
The scene contains more than 20 objects and
a total polygon count of 3 millions running on a simple consumer PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700. The haptic devices allow only three
DOFs, but the architecture of our workspace supports full six DOF force rendering.
3-DOF vs. 6-DOF - Playful Evaluation of Complex Haptic Interactions
Based in our workspace, we present a novel multiplayer game that supports
qualitative as well as quantitative evaluation of different haptic devices
in demanding haptic interaction tasks.
This work was partially supported by DFG grant ZA292/1-1 and the research project, founded by the Federal Minstry of Education and Research (BMBF) grant Avilus / 01 IM 08 001 U.
