Haptic Rendering of Virtual Shapes with the Novint Falcon

This paper evaluates the usability of the Novint Falcon for displaying virtual shapes that users can explore actively. Three experiments were conducted to measure the ease with which users can recognize and explore a set of seven haptic shapes. The first experiment deals with shape recognition using haptic feedback only. The second and third experiments propose two different rendering methods in which workspace is or is not limited by the contour of the shapes. Users’ results are presented to confirm the suitability of the proposed haptic device.