Modeling context in haptic perception, rendering and visualization

Haptic perception refers to the human ability to perceive spatial properties through tactile and haptic sensations. Humans have an uncanny ability to analyze objects based only on sparse information from haptic stimuli. Contextual clues about material of an object, its overall shape, size and weight configurations perceived by individuals, lead to recognition of an object and its spatial features. In this paper, we present strategies and algorithms to model context in haptic applications that allow user to explore objects in virtual reality/augmented reality, haptically. Our methodology is based on modeling user's cognitive and motor strategy of haptic exploration. Additionally we also model physiological arrangement of tactile sensors in the human hand. These models provide the context to adapt haptic displays to a user's style of haptic perception and exploration and the present state of the user's exploration. We designed a tactile cueing paradigm to test the validity of the contextual models. Initial results show improvement in accuracy and efficiency of haptic perception when compared to the conventional approaches that do not model context in haptic rendering.