Non-Realistic Haptic Feedback for Virtual Sculpture

The sense of feeling can effectively be used to enforce virtual artistic activities like virtual sculpting or modeling. In this paper, we describe how a virtual sculpture system has been extended with haptical feedback. In practice, we use the scalar field defining the implicit surface being modeled to efficiently compute several type of force feedback. We present a method for combining these forces differently depending whether the user is just touching his artwork or editing it by adding virtual matter. This technique enforces the interactivity of the task and leads to an enhanced non-tactorealistic feedback that increases the usability of the sculpture tool. The well-known problem of stability of the haptic feedback is also addressed in the particular case of implicit surface, in a new, simple and efficient manner