Haptic rendering of complex objects via directional sampling

Haptic rendering is a growing concern of research community worldwide. However, it is a great challenge to haptically render complex objects. In this paper, a novel haptic rendering algorithm via directional sampling is proposed. We propose haptic box, an intermediate representation of target objects for haptic rendering, which encodes the intersection data of each sample directional ray with the target object. With haptic box, the contact information between a line segment and the target object can be derived by several line-box intersection tests and bilinear interpolations, and can be directly used to evaluate the feedback force. Experimental results show that our algorithm is insensitive to model complexity at the run-time stage and works both effectively and efficiently.