Abstract:
The main purpose of computer game is to immerse
a user in a virtual environment. The perception of immersion
experience has been used to develop virtual reality applications
for game-based learning, healthcare, rehabilitation, etc. In
traditional games, the user immersion is performed through
the sense of visuals and sounds with interactions through 2D
input devices like mouse and keyboards. Haptic technology can
simulate tactile and kinesthetic sensations in virtual
environments. Recently developed games take advantage of the
haptic effects offered by some devices such as joysticks,
gamepads and haptic devices. However, the main criticism of
haptic-driven game development is that the real-time
interactions must allow graphical updates of 30 Hz and a much
higher frequency of 1 kHz for haptic feedback. This real-time
interaction and feedback are very important for development
of rehabilitation applications. The main goal of our research is
to enable real time simulation of force feedback for
rehabilitation games. This paper presents a framework for
developing the virtual whack-a-mole game for rehabilitation
based on haptic display. The proposed framework introduces a
collision handling method to compute feedback force and
provide realistic feedback through the haptic device.
