Stereohaptics: a haptic interaction toolkit for tangible virtual experiences

With a recent rise in the availability of affordable head mounted gear sets, various sensory stimulations (e.g., visual, auditory and haptics) are integrated to provide seamlessly embodied virtual experience in areas such as education, entertainment, therapy and social interactions. Currently, there is an abundance of available toolkits and application programming interfaces (APIs) for generating the visual and audio content. However, such richness in hardware technologies and software tools is missing in designing haptic experiences. Current solutions to integrate haptic effects are limited due to: i) a user's rigid adaptation to new hardware and software technologies, ii) limited scalability of the existing tools to incorporate haptic hardware and applications, iii) inflexible authoring capabilities, iv) missing infrastructure for storing, playback and distribution, and v) and unreliable hardware for long term usage.