An Immersive Granular Material Visualization System with Haptic Feedback

Abstract

Recent advances in distributed virtual reality systems and haptic technologies provide new opportunities to augment human sense of touch into highly complex and immersive visual simulations. Haptic feedback further enhances human immersion into virtual environments. We present techniques for portable and distributed rendering of real-time active and passive stereo views of virtual granular material that allow real-time haptic interaction and visualization. The main goal of the research was to develop highly portable and immersive virtual reality system that provides intuitive haptic interactions between a user and the granular material in several VR configurations. We developed real-time haptic enabled virtual sand rendering system for high-end VR systems, a FLEX (CAVETM-like display from Fakespace Systems), a high resolution tiled-wall display, comparatively low cost portable VR system that consists of two projectors with two horizontally and vertically polarizing filters, and the Disney projection screen. Our system has a distributed rendering architecture where a server computer is dedicated to haptic interaction force rendering and client computers are dedicated to a visual rendering of granular surface. Interconnection between the haptic and visual rendering programs is realized through a stream based TCP/IP communication. We report the architecture and implementation details of this highly portable and haptic force feedback enabled virtual reality system for interactive granular surface manipulation in this paper.