Dynamical issues in interactive representation of physical objects

EuroHaptics 2006, Paris : France (2006) The quality of a simulator equipped with a haptic interface is given by the dynamical properties of its components: haptic interface, simulator and control system. Some application areas of such kind of simulator like musical synthesis, animation or more general, instrumental art have specific requirements as for the "haptic rendering" of small movements that go beyond the usual haptic interfaces allow. Object properties variability and different situations of object combination represent important aspects of such type of application which makes that the user can be interested as much in the restitution of certain global properties of an entire object domain as in the restitution of properties that are specific to an isolate object. In the traditional approaches, the usual criteria are founded on the paradigm of transparency and are related to the impedance error introduced by the technical aspects of the system. As a general aim, rather than to minimize these effects, we look to characterize them by physical metaphors conferring to haptic medium the role of a tool. This positioning leads to firstly analyze the natural human object interaction as a simplified evolutive system and then considers its synthesis in the case of the interactive physical simulation. By means of a frequential method, this approach is presented for some elementary configurations of the simulator