Haptography: capturing the feel of real objects to enable authentic haptic rendering (invited paper)

Haptic interfaces are designed to allow humans to touch virtual objects as though they were real. Unfortunately, virtual surface models currently require extensive hand tuning and do not feel authentic, which limits the usefulness and applicability of such systems. The proposed approach of haptography seeks to address this deficiency by basing models on haptic data recorded from real interactions between a human and a target object. The studio haptographer uses a fully instrumented stylus to tap, press, and stroke an item in a controlled environment while a computer system records positions, orientations, velocities, accelerations, and forces. The point-and-touch haptographer carries a simply instrumented stylus around during daily life, using it to capture interesting haptic properties of items in the real world. Recorded data is distilled into a haptograph, the haptic impression of the object or surface patch, including properties such as local shape, stiffness, friction, and texture. Finally, the feel of the probed object is recreated via a haptic interface by accounting for the device's natural dynamics and focusing on the feedback of high-frequency accelerations.