A novel haptic interface and its application in CAD

In this paper, we propose a new general haptic interface, which is able to haptically render point clouds, NURBS curves and surfaces, and rigid heterogeneous material objects. A feature of this approach is the haptic cursor, which has a shape and size, instead of just a point. We also present two CAD applications based on that haptic interface; an experimental haptic sculpting system for B-spline surfaces, and a haptic based method to draw a NURBS curve upon a point based model. By taking advantage of our haptic rendering techniques, various haptic sculpting tools are developed to facilitate sculpting B-spline surfaces, resulting in more intuitive virtual sculpting paradigms. To draw a NURBS curve upon a point-based model is a difficult problem. However, this problem can be solved with relative ease using our haptic interface. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group.