A new design paradigm for the rapid development of haptic and telehaptic applications

The concept of modern day haptics - providing the simulated sense of touch - has been a topic of research since the early 1980's. Since then, a number of researchers and companies have striven to drive haptic applications into the mainstream. One of the primary barriers to the development of commercially viable application is the disconnection between the application visionaries, which tend not to be haptics experts, and the available development tools. In this paper, we discuss a new paradigm for haptic and telehaptic application development The basis of this new paradigm is a drag and drop, block diagram based design environment Thus, the application developers, which tend to have industry specific expertise but rarely haptic knowledge, are able to independently prototype haptic and telehaptic applications with minimal software coding. This new paradigm promises to vastly improve prototyping efficiency and enable a much larger group of application developers