Creating Continuous Force Feedback for Haptic Interaction of Volume Data Sets

Interacting with volumetric models via a haptic device presents an effective way of perceiving details concerning the models internal structures. Approaches to facilitate this range from interacting directly with the volume data to interacting with a polygonal surface derived from the data. Previous approaches have utilised a force field to provide continuous forces such as the Force-Map method which assigns a force vector at any position in the virtual environment. Nevertheless, the Force-Map method is still limited in simulating fast moving drilling due to the fact that there are no forces inside the volume. It suffers from a pop through problem when the virtual drill quickly moves against the volume object. To circumvent this problem, the work presented in this paper introduces a Level-Box method to improve the Force-Map method by encoding the object’s internal area into a number of levels which not only enables the user to touch the volume object by using a Force-Map, but also accelerates the Force-Map update procedure when drilling. Users can select from a variety of virtual tools to gain continuous and smooth force feedback during the drilling of volumetric data which increases the applicability of the approach