Haptics issues in virtual environments

Haptics is a recent enhancement to virtual environments, allowing users to "touch" and feel the simulated objects they interact with. Current commercial products allow tactile feedback through desktop interfaces (such as the FEELIt/sup TM/ mouse or the PHANToM/sup TM/ arm) and dextrous tactile and force feedback at the fingertips through haptic gloves (such as the CyberTouch/sup TM/ and the CyberGrasp/sup TM/). Virtual reality haptic programming requires good physical modeling of user interactions, primarily through collision detection, and of object responses, such as surface deformation, hard-contact simulation, slippage, etc. It is at present difficult to simulate complex virtual environments that have a realistic behavior. This task is added to by the recent introduction of haptic toolkits (such as Ghost/sup TM/ or VPS). Current technology suffers from a number of limitations, which go beyond the higher production cost of haptic interfaces. These technical drawbacks include the limited workspace of desktop interfaces, the large weight of force-feedback gloves, the lack of force feedback to the body, safety concerns, etc. Not to be neglected is the high bandwidth requirement of haptics, which is not met by current Internet technology. As a result, it is not possible at present to have a large number of remote participants interacting haptically in a shared virtual space.