Extending Blender: Development of a Haptic Authoring Tool

In this paper, we present our work to extend a well known 3D graphic modeler – Blender – to support haptic modeling and rendering. The extension tool is named HAMLAT (Haptic Application Markup Language Authoring Tool). We describe the modifications and additions to the Blender source code which have been used to create HAMLAT. Furthermore, we present and discuss the design decisions used when developing HAMLAT, and also an implementation "road map" which describes the changes to the Blender source code. Finally, we conclude with discussion of our future development and research avenues.