Interfacing Software & Hardware Haptic Rendering, Collision Detection & Feedback

Quest3D: Quest3D is a powerful 3D simulation engine. It’s not open source but the advantage is that it has a lot of ready-to-use channels that have integrated devices such as Wiimote and TrackIR, and it has a special channel for haptic feedback. Blender: Blender is an open source 3D simulation engine. It has a strong online support community, but integration of devices such as Wiimote has to be done manually. Choices of 3D simulation engines:

Interfacing Hardware to Software P5 Glove has been already integrated into Blender as well as Quest3D. Open source hand models, physical frames & drivers are available online. (E.g. for Blender refer to here) here In case P5 Glove is modified, and a more precise 6DOF IR tracking is implemented using devices such as Wiimote or TrackIR, further development has to be done to integrate the new devices into the simulation engines.

Haptic Rendering & Feedback The Haptic Rendering that will be done in the scope of this project will only include collision detection. For Quest3D VR Edition, there is a special channel dedicated to Haptic Feedback; further research has to be done regarding this feature of Quest3D. For Blender, it can communicate with Arduino Microcontroller using Python, pySerial & pyWin32 (Watch Video1, Video2)Watch Video1Video2

Other Method suggested is using a self- written server software in C++ that uses QT libraries which is platform independent. A python script in Blender sends out strings to the server via UDP and vice versa. The string sent are being parsed.