TUTORIAL: Web browser-based multimodal interactive simulation

Objectives: This tutorial will introduce the usefulness and potential of web browser-based multimodal interactive simulation, present a course for the required programming languages such as HTML5, JavaScript, and WebGL, and demonstrate how to create multimodal interactive simulation on the web environment. Significance: The web browser-based multimodal interactive simulation provides 3D interactive graphics, integration of electronic apparatuses including haptic devices, and computationally intensive simulation on the web browser directly. The software development environment is solely based on the license-free HTML5 standard, which enables the features with no need to install any additional software. Unlike typical applications, the web browser-based applications can directly run on a wide variety of user's existing machines such as desktop, laptop, tablets, smartphones, and even forthcoming platform, e.g., smart TVs. The accessibility and convenience is significant in that the framework will establish a new paradigm for development of multimodal interactive simulation. Impact: The web browser-based multimodal interactive simulation will be expected to innovatively reduce the initial setup and maintenance cost and effort compared to conventional systems, allows wide adoption of the developed applications over the world through the internet, which result in a much better overall haptics-related system.