A 6-DOF haptic interface and its applications in CAD

In this paper, we propose a new general 6-DOF haptic interface, which is able to provide both force and torque feedback to point clouds, NURBS curves and surfaces and rigid heterogeneous material virtual representations. A feature of this approach is the haptic cursor, which has a shape and size, instead of just a point. We also present two CAD applications based on that haptic interface; an experimental haptic sculpting system for B-spline surfaces and a haptic-based method to draw a NURBS curve upon a point-based model. By taking advantage of our haptic rendering techniques, various haptic sculpting tools are developed to facilitate sculpting B-spline surfaces, resulting in more intuitive virtual sculpting paradigms. To draw a NURBS curve upon a point-based model is normally a difficult problem. However, this problem can be solved with relative ease using our haptic interface.