Haptography: Capturing the Feel of Real Objects to Enable Authentic Haptic Rendering (Invited Paper)

Haptic interfaces are designed to allow humans to touch vir- tual 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 appli- cability of such systems. The proposed approach of haptog- raphy 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 in- strumented stylus to tap, press, and stroke an item in a con- trolled environment while a computer system records posi- tions, orientations, velocities, accelerations, and forces. The point-and-touch haptographer carries a simply instrumented stylus around during daily life, using it to capture interest- ing 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.