Haptic technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. The sensation of touch and / or force experienced by the user can be employed for didactic purposes. With respect to the educational context, the use of learning environments coupled with haptic technologies can significantly contribute to the experimentation and simulation of sensations that cannot be experienced directly ...

This paper describes an implementation of virtual teeth modeling for a haptic dental simulation. The system allows dental students to practice dental procedures with realistic tactual feelings. The system requires fast and stable haptic rendering and volume modeling techniques working on the virtual tooth. In our implementation, a volumetric implicit surface is used for intuitive shape modifica...

The work in the Touch Lab (formal name: Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics) is guided by a broad vision of haptics which includes all aspects of information acquisition and object manipulation through touch by humans, machines, or a combination of the two; and the environments can be real or virtual. We conduct research in multiple disciplines such as skin biomechanics, tactile neuroscien...

The “Haptic Scissors” is a device that creates the sensation of cutting in virtual environments. The scissors have two degrees of freedom of motion and force feedback, one for cutting (single blade rotation) and one for translation. An algorithm was developed to simultaneously display translational and cutting forces for a realistic cutting simulation. In previous work, we used filtered data fr...

This paper presents the procedure and results of two experiments dealing with the force resolution of the human finger and with haptic demands on push-buttons. The outcome is used to specify design details of a novel approach to a flexible control panel. A haptic display controlled by a PC enables the simulation of push-buttons with programmable forcedisplacement curves. The “just noticeable fo...

In this paper, we present a study that evaluates the effect of visual and haptic feedbacks and their relevance to human performance in a needle insertion task. A virtual needle insertion simulator with a four-layer tissue model (skin, fat, muscle, and bone) and haptic feedback is used for perceptual experiments. The task was to detect the puncture of a particular layer using haptic and visual c...

Haptics is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interact with computer applications. Haptic device gives people a sense of touch with computer generated environments, so that when virtual objects are touched, they seem real and tangible. Haptic technology refers to technology that interfaces the user with a virtual environment via the sense of touch by applying force...

Bone dissection is an important component of many surgical procedures. In this paper, we discuss a haptic and visual simulation of a bone cutting burr, that it is being developed as a component of a training system for temporal bone surgery. We use a physically motivated model to describe the burr–bone interaction, that includes haptic forces evaluation, the bone erosion process and the resulti...

In the present paper, we describe the mechanical design and working principle of a haptic device to be used during minimally invasive single port access cardiac surgeries. The details to hardware/software design and implementation to electronically actuate the device will be also presented. The viability of the design will be demonstrated by integrating the virtual representation of the left ve...

We present a methodology for both the efficient integration and dexterous manipulation of CAD models in a physical-based virtual reality simulation. The user interacts with a virtual car mock-up using a stringbased haptic interface that provides force sensation in a large workspace. A prop is used to provide grasp feedback. A mocap system is used to track user’s hand and head movements. In addi...