Overview of current developments in haptic APIs

Haptic technology as a key part of human-computer interaction allows us to use sense of touch in virtual reality by kinesthetic feel using force feedback. Increased production of haptic devices in recent years supported the development of many tools and libraries for programming applications with support of haptics. This paper introduces haptic technology and focuses on comparison of haptic application programming interfaces, especially on open-source and cross-platform solutions. We present different types of abstraction layers used in haptic APIs, basic haptic rendering methods and effects as well as a general overview of design concepts used in selected APIs. CHAI 3D haptic library is analyzed in more detail.