A haptic rendering system for virtual handheld electronic products: Master's thesis

A virtual prototype is a fully digital computer model that simulates a product's visual appearance, sound properties, the functionality of the user interface and its behaviour as closely as possible. Touch interaction, however, is one of the main information sources when we explore objects and interact with our environment. For this reason a haptic rendering system that enables the user to receive force and tactile feedback from 3D graphical models is studied. Haptic rendering gives the user the ability to sense the virtual prototype's physical properties such as shapes, materials and button properties. Haptic rendering with a stereographic view provides a realistic and comprehensive simulation of the physical user interfaces of products. An experimental haptic rendering system is developed for virtual prototypes of small-sized handheld electronic and telecommunication devices. The system provides tactile and force feedback from user-to-product interaction through a simulated user interface of the target product. The developed haptic rendering system is based on distributed architecture. The visual rendering process is executed on a separate computer from the haptic rendering process, which leaves more computational power for these processes. The haptic rendering system implemented is evaluated by haptically rendering a virtual prototype of a future cellular phone. The process for creating such a virtual prototype starts by designing a CAD model. The model is then converted to Open Inventor format which is the format used with haptic and visual rendering. The functionality and haptic properties are added to the converted model with a special tool to produce a haptically renderable functional virtual prototype. Experiences showed that adding functionality and haptic properties to static Open Inventor models and modifying these models is quick and easy. The realism of the sensations received from haptic rendering may be further developed by implementing a virtual fingertip which allows simulation of various fingertypes.