Haptic interaction in virtual environments

We present a haptic rendering framework that allows the tactile display of complex virtual environments. This framework allows surface constraints, surface shading, friction, texture and other effects to be modeled solely by updating the position of a representative object, the "virtual proxy". This abstraction reduces the task of the haptic servo control loop to the minimization of the error between user's position and that of the proxy. This framework has been implemented in a system that is able to haptically render virtual environments of a complexity that is near and often in excess of the capabilities of current interactive graphic systems.