Height field haptics

We present a system for haptically rendering large height field datasets. In as much as, height fields are naturally mapped to piecewise bilinear patches. We develop algorithms for intersection, penetration depth, and closest point tracking using bilinear patches. In contrast to many common haptic rendering schemes for polygonal models, this approach does not require preprocessing or additional storage. Thus, it is particularly suitable for the large scale datasets found in geographic and reverse engineering applications.