IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION, VOL. 15, NO. 3, JUNE 1999 1 Book Reviews Virtual Reality Technology--G. Burdea and Ph. Coiffet (New York: Wiley, 1994, pp. 400.) Reviewed by A. K. Bejczy Virtual Reality Technology is a welcome book contribution to theengineering literature. It offers an authentic and below-the surface explanation of and insight into this fascinating and rapidly evolving field of technology. In the Introduction the authors immediatelyemphasize that virtual reality (VR) technology includes far more than some computer graphics generated and realistic looking simulation of world scenarios, though computer graphics plays a key visualizationrole in the manifestation of VR technology products. According to the authors, equally important elements of this technology are three big "I" capabilities: Immersion-Interaction-Imagination. Immersion-Interaction is a twin element and denotes the VR users' capability to interact with the simulated world scenarios through all human sensory and motoric input and output channels. The third big "I" element,Imagination, has some artistic undertone, but--according to the authors--it essentially relates to the human imaginative inventiveness that searches and finds valuable applications for VR technology,applications that address and solve particular real problems in engineering, medicine, and so on. Following the Introduction, which also tells a brief history ofVR technology, the book content is distributed in eight chapters. The first chapter describes VR Tools which include 3-D position sensors, trackballs, sensing gloves, stereo viewing devices, 3-D soundgenerators and their evaluation. The next chapter is dedicated to Touch and Force Feedback, a new and exciting augmentation of VR interface techniques. The next chapter discusses the Computing Architectures that are needed to satisfy the real-time computational demands of VR simulations. The subsequent chapter deals with Modeling including geometric, kinematic and physical modeling and The reviewer is with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute ofTechnology, Pasadena, CA 91109 USA. Publisher Item Identifier S 1042-296X(99)03545-4. model segmentation. The following chapter is dedicated to Programming in VR which includes the description of powerful programmingpackages such as "WorldTookKit" or "Amaze" constructed to help VR application developers. This chapter also contains over 20 highquality color illustrations and lists a few noncommercial VR toolkitsthat support less expensive I/O devices, but provide less performance graphics. They are, however, useful for proof-of-concept in initial stages of R&D work. The next chapter deals with Human Factors in VR, including VR evaluation methodologies which are only in the emerging stage. In this chapter, the authors also discuss the VR and society relation as VR may impact the professional, private and publiclife. The next to last chapter is about Applications, and occupies nearly 80 pages. The authors discuss the applications in five major domains: 1) medicine and rehabilitation; 2) entertainment, arts, and education; 3) military and aerospace; 4) business; 5) robotics and manufacturing. It becomes very clear at the end of this chapter that application of VR technology can improve design and training procedures and can lead to performance effectiveness that could not be achieved before. Thelast chapter is about The Future. Here the authors look at envisioned new components of VR technology like large volume tracking, new visual and haptic displays, neural interfaces, "image gloves," voicecontrol, and portable computers. This chapter concludes with a desire that in the future programming and modeling standards will be developed, primarily to allow large scale networking of numerouscomputing platforms of various hardware architectures. The book is augmented with a useful list of bibliography on 25 pages and a list of companies and research laboratories involved inVR technology development. The book can be recommended not only to the curious beginners, but also to the practitioners since it offers a well-integrated overviewof VR technology as a whole in the mid-1990's. (C) 1999 IEEE
BOOK REVIEW "VR News," UK, Vol. 5, No. 7, page 32, 1996. Force and Touch Feedback for Virtual Reality Grigore Burdea John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: 1996 ISBN 0-471-02141-5 At last, a book completely devoted to haptics. Haptics researchers have been forced to choose between two courses of action: to laboriously collect paper after paper from sources well-known and obscure, or to remain blissfully ignorant of the work of their peers. For those with a mentor or two, taking the high road was much easier, but for others it was a daunting challenge. Now, for the price of a book, Greg Burdea has tackled much of the challenge for us. Burdea's first book on virtual reality, Virtual Reality Technology (with P. Coiffet, VR News review June 1995) offered broad coverage of VR technologies, with a chapter on force and touch feedback. Such books offer more enlightenment to the reader on topics outside his or her specialization than within it. What I hungered for was a resource that would put years of accumulated haptics knowledge in one place, contain a few nuggets that I'd overlooked in my searching, and offer enough clarity and completeness that I could simply hand it to a newcomer in my laboratory with the imperative, "read this." A few book chapters have emerged as valuable references, but this book is the first to sate my desire. The book is almost two books in one: a diligent coverage of the basic issues in force and touch feedback, and an exhaustive review of the state of the art. While state-of-the-art reviews have temporal limitations, the good ones define a common starting point for future effort and age gracefully into historical references. The book begins with the basics, giving a brief historical perspective, leading into a discussion of human haptic sensing and control issues. The chapter on actuators will be especially useful to those without a mechanics background. The next few chapters detail the state of the art. The latter third of the book examines what can be done with knowledge and hardware. It addresses the important questions of how to program virtual environments with haptic qualities and how to control haptic devices to present the forces generated by those environments. The human factors chapter introduces some basic methods of performance measurement and covers some notable papers, though as with other facets of this book, a reader searching for deep understanding will still need to refer to the source material. A chapter on applications gives an exciting taste of the possibilities for haptics, with a bias towards medical uses. The final chapter projects future developments, concentrating on two constraints of present day haptics: the relative scarcity of suitable actuators and the tendency of feedback devices to tie the user to one spot. One concern I have is the relative immaturity of the information available to guide device designers. The field has certainly not progressed to the stage that a "designer's cookbook" is possible. The various tables and summaries in the book should be interpreted carefully, and performance figures should be checked for relevance to any intended application. It's still an imperfect world, so practical designers will have to make do with a good book that's not quite a design guide, or hold their breath and plunge into the more than 20 pages of references at the back of the book. A few other nice features of this book deserve mention. Burdea makes excellent use of figures (drawings, photographs, and charts), and includes eight pages of attractive color plates. Another ten pages list companies and research laboratories around the world, with phone numbers, postal, and e-mail addresses. A listing of relevant Web sites would have been nice, but these can always be obtained through the e-mails or by visiting the Haptics Community Web page at http://haptic.mech.nwu.edu/. If you have any desire to have much of your accumulated haptics information gathered in one place, to find out if there's anything that you've missed, or have a need to introduce newcomers to haptics, then this book should be in your library. Hopefully, a second edition will follow in a few years as the rapid progress in research and commercial haptics makes more mature design information available and concrete wage-earning applications make their place amidst demonstration projects and speculation. Christopher Hasser, September 1996 Christopher Hasser received his MS in Electrical Engineering while at the USAF Armstrong Laboratory. He has over five years experience with force and tactile feedback devices as a researcher and research manager. During that time he managed SBIR contracts, headed the Human Sensory Feedback and Telepresence Project, and became recognized as the Air Force expert on haptic feedback issues. He has published extensively, and has coauthored a book chapter on haptic feedback (The Haptic Illusion, in "The Digital Illusion," ed. Clark-Dodsworth, ACM/Addison-Wesley, in press). In June 1966 Christopher joined Immersion Corporation as Chief Research Engineer. He can be reached at c.hasser@ieee.org or http://www.immerse.com.
BOOK REVIEW Building and Feeling Virtual Worlds By Ben Delaney CyberEdge Journal, October 1996. Feeling virtual worlds * * * * * (5 stars rating) One of the most common complaints about virtual world experiences is that the lack of physical sensations in the environment. Visual simulation is nearing photographic quality, and 3D sound is very convincing. But as soon as one touches a virtual object, or picks up a virtual car and tosses it into the next simulation, one has a great sense of incompleteness. "Why", the question is often asked, "can't I feel anything in this great virtual reality?" There is no easy answer to that question, despite the millions of dollars and thousands of hours spent trying to understand and duplicate our incredibly subtle and complex haptic senses. However, at last, we can at least understand the magnitude of the problem, and the state of the art. Grigore Burdea, an Associate Professor at the CAIP Center of Rutgers University, spent most of last year engaged in research and writing about this missing dimension of VR. His new book, Force and Touch Feedback for Virtual Reality, is the result of that effort. As far as I know, there is no more complete or erudite book on the subject. Burdea careful lays the groundwork for his survey of force feedback (resistive impulses, FFB) and tactile feedback (sensations of texture, temperature, etc., TFB) devices and concepts by providing a thorough background in human proprioception. He shares with the reader the fruits of his research: how the various receptors in the skin, muscles, bones and joints interact, how the nervous system perceives and conveys haptic data, reaction times and bandwidths of human response, and much more. He describes studies on the resolution of feeling, the average strength of various parts of the body, and time to fatigue. All in all, one is left with the impression that Burdea is a man with a good feel for the subject. Interestingly, reading this book made me all the more pessimistic regarding our likelihood of ever having good FFB devices for general use. The problem is manifold. As Burdea points out, the range of forces that human beings are capable of feeling and reacting to is great. It spans several orders of magnitude, from the gentle caress of a lover brushing away a strand of hair, to the rough effort required to push a recalcitrant automobile. Designing one device, even a hybrid device, to duplicate this range of force is a daunting concept. Furthermore, FFB devices must be grounded. That is, they must have something to push against. A portable FFB device would necessarily be of limited scope. The outlook for TFB devices is much better. Because these devices are not resistive in nature, they can (indeed, should be) small and portable. A glove with an inner surface made of nano-mechanical effectors is conceivable, and could possibly provide realistic sensations of friction, slippage, texture, and other sensations. However, the likelihood of such a device being built in the next few years is slim. Lacking any ideal solution, many experimenters and manufacturers, Burdea among them, have developed limited force and tactile feedback devices. Many such devices, such as the (CJ-winning) Phantom, and the Impulse Engine, are commercially available and are finding acceptance in specialty applications. Most people in the VR business are familiar with the GROPE experiment carried out at UNC chapel Hill, in which a large FFB arm, designed for working with radioactive materiel, has been used to evaluate the value of FFB in molecular docking research. Medical simulation is an important use of FFB, and gamers are starting to see low-cost devices built into joysticks and other controllers. All of this, and a great deal more, is carefully covered in this book. Were I giving a course in haptic simulation, this would be my text of choice. I recommend it without reservation to anyone considering adding haptic feedback to a simulation. If you haven't covered this material, you would need a lot of time to catch up. Luckily, Burdea has done it for us. Force and Touch Feedback for Virtual Reality, by Grigore Burdea. Published by John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 0-471-02141-5, hard cover, illustrated, indexed, us$54.95.