Haptic Dissection of Deformable Objects using Extended Finite Element Method

Abstract

Interactive dissection simulation is an important research topic in the virtual reality (VR) community. There are many efforts on this topic; however, most of them focus on building a realistic simulation system regardless of the cost, and they often require expensive workstations and specialized haptic devices which prevent broader adoption. We show how to build a realistic dissection simulation at an affordable cost, which opens up applications in elementary education for virtual dissections which are currently not feasible.

In this thesis, we present a fast and robust haptic system for interactive dissection simulations of finite elements based deformable objects which supports two type of haptic interactions: point contacts and cuts. We design a semi-progressive virtual dissection scheme of deformable objects in a real-time application. The quality and performance of visual/haptic feedback is demonstrated on a low-end commercial desktop PC with a haptic device.