Implementing haptic feedback in a projection screen virtual environment
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Abstract
Haptics refers to the sensing of force, weight, or other physical properties through feeling and touch. The additional information from haptic or force feedback makes certain engineering design tasks, such as part assembly, much easier than using a traditional computer interface. Typically, haptic feedback is combined with virtual reality through a stereo monitor or head mounted display. This research seeks to combine force feedback via the PHANToM haptic device with a projection screen virtual environment and explore some benefits to engineering design. To achieve this goal several concepts are presented including a stand to hold the PHANToM in the environment, a volume to scale the PHANToM's workspace to the virtual world, and an application to control the PHANToM with the GHOST software. Two example uses for haptic feedback in the virtual environment are presented, a NURBS surface and a virtual assembly application. The assembly example uses Boeing's Voxmap PointShell (VPS) software to produce a much more versatile application than what GHOST is capable of alone. Finally, the benefits of haptic feedback in these examples and some guidelines for using them are presented, along with some suggestions for future work in this area.