Collaborative Haptic Exploration of Dynamic Remote Environments

Haptic perception is an important modality in reinforcing the presence of virtual or remote targets, but providing haptic feedback of dynamic environments still remains a challenging task. We address the issue of haptic telepresence systems by improving and integrating two independent approaches: real-time haptic rendering of unstructured spatial data and collaborative interaction with a remote partner. Contact with physical constraints is directly estimated from streaming point-cloud data without surface reconstruction, and haptic guidance cues that restrict or promote the user's motion can be provided by both predefined triggers and gesture-based input from a helper. Through a user study with a proof-of-concept prototype, the authors show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of remote exploration tasks while enabling stable haptic interaction with real-world spatial data.