Using a Scripting Engine to Facilitate the Development of Force Fields in a Distributed Haptic Setup

Abstract

Enactive interfaces often make use of force feedback devices. In order to efficiently use the available processing power, haptic rendering can be offloaded to another computer. However, when the force feedback algorithms themselves must be extended, a distributed setup can be problematic as the server must be recompiled. In this paper, we elaborate on a system, built on top of VRPN, that allows to script force fields on the client side and execute them on the server side without a significant processing penalty.