Haptic interface to Di-Guy

Much of the state-of-the-art commercial simulation software focuses on providing realistic animations and convincing artificial intelligence to avatars within a scenario. Research on enhancing the interactivity and immersion of such simulation is not generally as highly refined. Based on the research of our user-study, we identify that it is desirable for simulation software to have improved interaction between users and the scenario. The more intuitive interactions that the system has, the better the immersive experience will be. Based on this idea, we propose a pipeline to effectively integrate haptic interactions into the DI-Guy simulation environment, with the goal of improving user interactivity with the avatars in the scenario. By implementing such a pipeline, simulation packages will be capable of not only enhancing control over certain actions of avatars, but also providing realistic force feedback to the user. Unlike typical haptic integration approach which is based on high-level libraries and existing haptic collision detection and force rendering algorithms, we implement our own novel algorithm based on the fact we do not have direct access to low-level primitives such as vertices and normals in the virtual environment. Besides, we also implemented our own vendor-independent middleware as a part of our algorithm to provide a generic solution for integration of natural interfaces such as haptics and 3D space mouse with commercial software to enable the building of a complete immersive virtual training system.