Development of a Web-Based Haptic Authoring Tool for Multimedia Applications

In this paper, we introduce an MPEG-V based haptic authoring tool intended for simplifying the development process of haptics-enabled multimedia applications. The developed tool provides a web-based interface for users to create haptic environments by importing 3D models and adding haptic properties to them. The user can then export the resulting environment to a standard MPEG-V format. The latter can be imported to a haptic player that renders the described haptics-enabled 3D scene. The proposed tool can support many haptic devices, including Geomagic Devices, Force Dimension Devices, Novint Falcon Devices, and Moog FCS HapticMaster Devices. We conduct a proof of concept HTML5 haptic game project and user studies on haptic effects, development process and user interface, which shows our tool's effectiveness in simplifying the development process of haptics-enabled multimedia applications.