Plugins for other haptic devices

[xabbu]

Hello,

I am wondering if there is any tutorial or source code examples on how to implement the interface between for example a selfmade haptic device and the haptics environment in Worldviz.

I am currently developing a new haptic device for the human arm and it would be great to get some information on how to interface between the haptics device abstractionlayer/driver to the hd environment in worldviz.

Thanks allready in advance and cheers,

xabbu

[mspusch]

Hi Xabbu, I have moved your post into the section "Plug-in development ".

Concerning your question, you can find the following under the section 'download' - 'Vizard' on the worldviz webpage:

"Vizard 3.0 Plug-in SDK"

"All Sensor Plugin Sources
Visual Studio projects for many hardware sensor plugins"

This might answer part of your question. I'm not one of the programmers myself and don't know how to best interface a haptics device. I have informed the programmers to get back to you about this. Have a nice weekend!

[tobin]

There is really no built-in haptics environment in Vizard. Vizard supports Sensable and other haptic devices but these supported products are done through the manufacturers' own SDKs.

We can certainly provide plug-in skeleton's that show how to send and receive data from Vizard and how to get access to Vizard's scene graph.

Can you supply some more details about what kind of data you would want to exchange back and forth with Vizard?

[xabbu]

First of all thanks for these quick responses.
For a little more information about the device which is being developed:

This will be a haptics device for the human arm with 3 DoF in the beginning.
Somewhat similar to allready existing solutions like the desktop devices that are out there (sensable, novint etc.).
So if I understood that right: the plugin sdk is somewhat only the abstraction layer between the driver interface/api of the developer of a hd and the python layer in vizard.

So this means you are actually giving the connected haptics device the commands for example for force presentation via the command function provided in your plugin sdk.
Now I saw in your examples regarding the openhaptics by sensable that you are actually using predefined functions of their api in order to render certain haptic effects like springforce, dampened force etc.
So by "vizard has no built in haptics functions" you actually mean that the functions for rendering the displayed forces by their fxtype is not regarded by vizard.
For haptic rendering I would then at least need information about colliding objects in the scenegraph and their positions in order to calculate the forces in my haptics device api/driver.

I hope I kind of reasoned correctly.

cheers,

xabbu

[tobin]

I think we're on the same page. You can leverage Vizard's physic's engine to have Vizard report collision events between mesh objects if you like. And you can certainly query objects about their 6DOF states. Do you need more help at this point to get started?

[xabbu]

Thx tobin, I think I am setup so far with the information I needed. But I will happily come back once I encounter some other issues...

Take care,
xabbu