Haptic media from an information-theoretic perspective

Haptic rendering has been long considered as the process of estimating the force that stems from the interaction of a user and an object. It can be thus seen as a closed loop system, where the user´s actions drive the “simulation” that feeds back to the user the respective forces. Even if this approach follows the principles of natural haptic interaction, it places severe limitations in processing haptic media and does not follow the paradigm of audiovisual media that allow for open loop processing and rendering. This paper provides an information theoretic perspective of haptic rendering. 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, while 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 applications including coding, indexing and rendering of stand-alone haptic media.