The design of 3D Haptic widgets

3D interaction with a computer is hard. As human interaction in the real world is quite dependent on haptics, we believe that adding haptics will alleviate many of the problems of 3D interaction with a computer. The naive approach to incorporating haptics would be to simply find existing objects and imitate them. This, however, would not seem to adequately leverage what is possible with a reasonably general force feedback device, as it does not take advantage of the ability to provide forces that are not physically based, or to simulate objects and behavior that could have been physically realized but weren’t, or which would have been prohibitively difficult to physically realize. From our extensive experience with designing haptic computer user interfaces and using haptic interfaces in the real world we have abstracted from those interactions certain qualities which we present in this paper. In addition, this paper demonstrates how to use these qualities in the analysis and design of a suite of 3D haptic widgets, most of which are novel and many of which include non-physically based forces