Haptic interaction of hair and textiles

The 3D representation of animated objects is largely exploited in many industries for over two decades. The touch-based interaction with such objects for modelling purposes is an increasingly active research area with huge application potential. However, simulating the contact interactions enabling to model complex deformable objects in virtual reality environments and reproducing the associated haptic sensations are challenging tasks. Their computationally intensive character requires defining an appropriate trade-off between the allowed simulation accuracy and the requested performance. Time-critical tasks must be individually computed at the desired speed and efficiently synchronized in order to enable a physically plausible interaction experience. Hence, applications enabling haptics-based manipulation require a tailored and computationally efficient design. In our presentation, we discuss two such systems for the interaction with hair and textiles. Results of the European Research Project Haptex will be presented.