A Haptic System for Drilling into Volume Data with Polygonal Tools

Abstract

With the developments of volume visualization technology for complex data sets comes new challenges in terms of user interaction and information extraction. Volume haptics has proven itself to be an effective way of extracting valuable information by providing an extra sense from which to perceive three dimensional data. This paper presents a haptic system for using arbitrary polygonal tools for drilling into volume data. By using this system, users can select from a variety of virtual tools to gain continuous and smooth force feedback during the drilling of volumetric data. As the user manipulates the haptic device the tool typically only moves a small amount. By considering the locations of the data points, that are modified when drilling, a relatively small number of voxels are determined each frame which must be recomputed by a Marching Cubes algorithm.