Haptic Rendering of Cultural Heritage Objects at Different Scales

Abstract: In this work, we address the issue of a virtual representation of objects of cultural heritage for haptic interaction. Our main focus is to provide haptic access to artistic objects of any physical scale to the differently-abled people. This is a low-cost system and, in conjunction with a stereoscopic visual display, gives a better immersive experience even to the sighted persons. To achieve this, we propose a simple multilevel, proxy-based hapto-visual rendering technique for point cloud data, which includes the much-desired scalability feature which enables the users to change the scale of the objects adaptively during the haptic interaction. For the proposed haptic rendering technique, the proxy updation loop runs at a rate 100 times faster than the required haptic updation frequency of 1KHz. We observe that this functionality augments very well with the realism of the experience.