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Haptics

Because many of you seem to be interested in Novint Falcon ...

• Teminology: Haptic vs. tactile 1

• Technology

  • DirectInput devices: mouse with vibration, force feedback joystick, steering wheel, ...

  • Arm-like controllers 1 2 3

    • Price range 1 2

    • Workspace

    • Degrees of freedom for input

    • Degrees of freedom for (force) output

  • Pulling strings 1

  • Data gloves with haptic extension 1

  • Haptics for the feet 1

  • Feeling gravity 1

  • Poor man's version: pseudo haptics 1

• Possible uses

  • Modeling 1

  • Animation 1

  • Education 1 2

  • Alternative/extended GUIs 1

  • UIs for handicapped users 1

  • Musical instruments 1 2

  • Games!! 1

• Haptic Rendering 1 2 3

  • Analog of visual 3D rendering (but we may “display” something completely with the haptic device, as we may display non-3D color patterns on the computer's screen)

  • Step 1: Collision Detection. Tricky because 1000 updates per second at a high spatial resolution would be best.

  • Step 2: Computation of the force to be applied. Typically, one defines a “Haptic Interface Point” that is the virtual analog of the haptic device's tip, and an “Ideal Haptic Interface Point” that tries to follow the Haptic Interface Point but cannot penetrate objects. The distance between these two points can be used to define a force vector.

  • Textures and shaders similar to those for visual rendering

• APIs for Novint Falcon

  • Novint HDAL

  • Sensegraphics H3DAPI

Boards With Non-Rectangular Topology

Something completely different, to get started with thinking about game design.

• Gameplay issues with rectangular and similar boards 1

  • Some places are “better” than others.

  • Special rules may be required for the boundaries.

• Alternatives with different topology (mathematically speaking)

  • Torus (doughnut)

    • May be displayed as a rectangle with invisible pathways between left and right as well as top and bottom (but boundaries still present in the player's mind?)

    • Coordinate system nearly as usual. Need to wrap. For distance computations, one may have to pick a path that wraps “around”.

  • Sphere 1 2

    • Hard to display in full (2D Map? 3D on screen? Globe display?)

    • The naïve coordinate system (latitude/longitude) leads to singularities at the poles and makes it hard to compute distances and to apply textures. A solution without singularities but with even more complex computations is to use the surface of a cube (i.e. six connected squares) as coordinate space and to project a point (x,y,z) on the cube (centered around the origin) onto the unit sphere by forming (x,y,z)/sqrt(x²+y²+z²).

  • Any other ideas? 1 2 3

• A real-life example

• Evaluation

  • What is the research question, actually?

  • Which experiments to conduct?

Miscellaneous

• A Bremen-based animation studio expressed interest in custom made plug-ins for Animation Master.

• Microsoft's development products and operating systems are now available online for our students.

• C++ crash course?