Haptic Interaction with Elastic Volumetric Structures

Considerable efforts have been done to produce realistic results when simulating interaction with elastic materials. Many applications such as surgery planning, medical training, or virtual sculpting would benefit from a plausible simulation scenario. However, even though many works have proposed very satisfactory results, realistic simulation of deformable bodies is still an open issue. One of the challenges when designing a realistic elastic body simulation is the huge amount of data that needs to be processed. For the inner properties of the material are crucial when it comes to reproduce the elastic problem, the simulation naturally calls for volumetric information. In this paper the authors propose a technique to interactively deform 3D images, such as those acquired by a CT scanner. While producing a physically plausible haptic feedback, deformation and visualization algorithms produce an efficient and natural feeling. Using a free form deformation structure as a wrapper, it is possible to deform complex structures at high frame rates, independently of the size of the volume.