Enabling design and interactive selection of haptic modes

The ever increasing size and complexity of volumetric data in a wide range of disciplines makes it useful to augment volume visualization tools with alternative modalities. Studies have shown that introducing haptics can significantly increase both exploration speed and precision. It is also capable of conveying material properties of data and thus has great potential to improve user performance in volume data exploration. In this paper we describe how recent advances in volume haptics can be used to build haptic modes-building blocks for haptic schemes. These modes have been used as base components of a toolkit allowing for more efficient development of haptic prototypes and applications. This toolkit allows interactive construction, configuration and fine-tuning of both visual and haptic representations of the data. The technology is also used in a pilot study to determine the most important issues and aspects in haptic volume data interaction and exploration, and how the use of haptic modes can facilitate the implementation of effective haptic schemes