The Convergence of Robotics, Vision, and Computer Graphics for User Interaction

Mechanical interfaces to virtual environments and the creation of virtual environments represent important and relatively new application areas for robotics. The creation of immersive interfaces will require codevelopment of visual displays that complement mechanical stimuli with appropriate visual cues, ultimately determined from human psychophysics. Advances in interactive rendering and geometric modeling from computer graphics will play a key role. Examples are drawn from haptic and locomotion interface projects.