Handling haptics as a stand-alone medium

Abstract

This paper provides an information theoretic perspective of haptic rendering that aims to formulate the necessary theoretical foundations to lead to a compact and holistic representation of haptic media. Initially, an information theoretic view on haptic rendering is presented that enables the development of metrics enabling measuring of haptic information. Following the principles of information theory, two novel haptic information rendering pipelines are provided. Moreover, several quantities like entropy, mutual information and filters are defined and instantiated for the case of haptic rendering. Explicit examples of their potential use are analyzed. The paper concludes with examples and a discussion on how information theory can be used to provide a holistic haptic media representation scheme that can be used in a variety of application including coding, indexing and rendering of stand-alone haptic media.