Haptic Navigation and Exploration of High Quality Pre-rendered Environments

Visualising in real-time high quality virtual environments, which are suitable for cultural heritage and virtual tourism, is often a challenging endeavour. This is primarily, due to the cost of rendering complex architectural structures. Incorporating the sense of touch into real time environments enhances a user's experience, leading towards a higher level of immersion. However, the confining requirement of the haptic feedback loop to cycle at 1000Hz has led to many applications employing lower quality scenes. In this paper a technique is presented which permits high quality pre-rendered animations of dynamic environments to be both visualised and navigated at high interactive rates. In particular, the approach provides the user with the ability to touch the content of the animations and to freely orientate themselves in any direction, leading to haptically aware movies. Consequently, this permits an exploration of an otherwise prohibitively complex scene consisting of large volumes of geometry and texture maps, combined with realistic lighting models. This component is illustrated within a virtual tour framework enabling users to navigate semi-prescribed routes using haptic feedback both in a spatial and temporal context.