Haptic-dependent navigation & interaction of hybrid virtual models

Recent studies in haptic technologies provide more information channels that allow visual techniques to be augmented with haptic methods in scientific visualization. Most haptic devices utilize point interactions, resulting in a conflict between the low information bandwidth and further complication of data exploration. Traditionally in large-set data exploration, multi-resolution description is commonly applied to manage intelligently the complexity of rendered dataset at render time, maximizing the perceptual benefit of rendering to users. In this paper, the hierarchical impostor representations of surface & volume models are constructed, and the optimal performance based on cost & benefit evaluation at run time is employed to meet both the visual & hapic interaction qualities, providing more information of contacted objects transferred by both the visual and haptic feedbacks. During haptic-dependent navigation & interaction, our system adaptively determines the rendering mode using haptics & graphics impostors represented in the unified processing framework. Our experimental results have demonstrated the satisfactory performance of proposed haptic interaction framework applicable for hybrid virtual models.