HAPTICS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS - TAXONOMY, RESEARCH STATUS, AND CHALLENGES

Haptic displays are emerging as effective interaction aids for improvi ng the realism of virtual worlds. Being able to touch, feel, and manip ulate objects in virtual environments has a large number of exciting a pplications. The underlying technology, both in terms of electromechan ical hardware and computer software, is becoming mature and has opened up novel and interesting research areas. In this paper, we clarify th e terminology of human and machine haptics and provide a brief overvie w of the progress recently achieved in these fields, based on our inve stigations as well as other studies. We describe the major advances in a new discipline, Computer Haptics (analogous to computer graphics), that is concerned with the techniques and processes associated with ge nerating and displaying haptic stimuli to the human user. We also summ arize the issues and some of our results in integrating haptics into m ultimodal and distributed virtual environments, and speculate on the c hallenges for the future. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.