Haptic Exploration of Photographs

Exploration of 2-D images is a challenging problem in computer haptics
and research has primarily been focused on the exploration of
restricted types of images, e.g., maps or mathematical curves. In
contrast, in this talk I will describe the design and implementation
of a system for the haptic exploration of general photographs.

In our approach, the photographs are first processed for haptic
rendering by organizing objects in the scene into a hierarchy. I will
present our interactive image editor that enables us to generate these
object-level hierarchies efficiently using various image segmentation
techniques combined with some novel user interactions. The set of
contours corresponding to the objects in the hierarchy are then
rendered with a point-based haptics device as three-dimensional
grooves on a 2D image plane. The main contribution of our haptic image
explorer is the support for browsing multiple levels-of-detail of the
contour image. The explorer also supports ambient encoding of the
spatial surrounding of the haptic cursor using vibration textures
efficiently encoded as digital filters. Finally, I will discuss a
preliminary user study to evaluate the efficacy of multiple
levels-of-detail and of ambient encoding of the spatial surrounding
through textures.

This is joint work with David Lareau and Fan Zhang.