A survey of 67 experienced orthopedic surgeons indicated that precise portal placement was the most important skill in arthroscopic surgery. However, none of the currently available virtual reality simulators include simulation / training in portal placement, including haptic feedback of the necessary puncture force. This study aimed to: (1) measure the in vivo force and stiffness during a port...

We address the need of researchers in nanotechnology who desire an increased level of perceptualization of their simulation data by adding haptic feedback to existing multidimensional volumetric visualizations. Our approach uses volumetric data from simulation of an LED heteronanostructure, and it translates projected values of amplitude of an electromagnetic field into a force that is delivere...

Real-time surgical simulation often requires computing the deformations of visco-elastic human-body tissue and generating both graphic and haptic renderings. As human users are more sensitive to small haptic discrepancies than visual ones, good force rendering requires a refresh rate of 500Hz or more, which is far beyond the capabilities of current simulators. Moreover, if the simulator runs on...

In collaboration with the Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies center (SUMMIT), Immersion Corporation has designed and developed a new haptic simulation interface for minimally invasive surgical simulators. This device, shown in Figure 1, features two similar master manipulators that each have five degrees of freedom equipped with haptic feedback. The centers of the gi...

Aerospace industry has been involved in virtual simulation for design and testing since the birth of virtual reality. Today this industry is showing a growing interest in the development of haptic-based maintenance training applications, which represent the most advanced way to simulate maintenance and repair tasks within a virtual environment by means of a visual-haptic approach. The goal is t...

Computer-assisted surgical (CAS) planning tools are available for craniofacial surgery, but are usually based on computer-aided design (CAD) tools that lack the ability to detect the collision of virtual objects (i.e., fractured bone segments). We developed a CAS system featuring a sense of touch (haptic) that enables surgeons to physically interact with individual, patient-specific anatomy and...

Experiments in Surface Perception using a Fingertip Haptic Display by Steven Craig Venema Chairperson of Supervisory Committee: Professor Blake Hannaford Department of Electrical Engineering A haptic display provides the mechanical analog of a physical environment for our sense of touch in a virtual reality (VR) simulation system. In this dissertation, we explore the design and implementation o...

Recent advances in both haptic rendering techniques and CPU power have made haptic feedback increasingly accessible on consumer hardware. With the recent success of simple haptic feedback devices in console and PC game systems, more sophisticated haptic rendering is poised to enter the mass entertainment market in the near future. With this in mind, we describe “Haptic Battle Pong”, a competiti...

This paper describes an interactive dynamic simulator for virtual environments which allows user interaction via a haptic interface. The interactive simulation is performed in our testbed dynamic simulator I-GMS, which has been developed in an object-oriented framework for simulating motions of free bodies and complex linkages such as those needed for robotic systems or human body simulation. U...

This paper presents a new method for a six degrees of freedom haptic feedback in molecular docking simulations in virtual reality. The proposed method allows haptic interaction even in the case of classical molecular simulation which implies notoriously long computation time. These simulations are based on the Newtonian mechanics theory and imply an energetic interaction description between ato...