The Force-Map Haptic Rendering Algorithm for Drilling into Volume Data

With the developments of volume visualization technology for complex data sets comes new challenges in terms of user interaction and information extraction. Volume haptics has proven itself to be an effective way of extracting valuable information by providing an extra sense from which to perceive three dimensional data. The work presented in this paper introduces a Force-Map method that combines the benefits of the indirect and the direct haptic rendering approaches. Users can select from a variety of virtual tools to gain continuous and smooth force feedback during the drilling of volumetric data which increases the applicability of the approach.