Redirected touching: Warping space to remap passive haptics

There is an increasing interest in deployable virtual military training systems. Haptic feedback for these training systems can enable users to interact more naturally with the training environment, but is difficult to deploy. Passive haptic feedback is very compelling, but it is also inflexible. Changes made to virtual objects can require time-consuming changes to their physical passive-haptic counterparts. This poster explores the possibility of mapping many differently shaped virtual objects onto one physical object by warping virtual space and exploiting the dominance of the visual system. A first implementation that maps different virtual objects onto dynamically captured physical geometry is presented, and potential applications to deployable military trainers are discussed.