Haptic Rendering of Volumetric Data

Volume rendering has become an effective tool for real time medical data inspection. Direct volume haptics, by
analogy, would like to provide a means to present the full data through force feedback without restricting the
exploration to a subset of the data presented through an intermediate representation such as an extracted surface.
The purpose of this master thesis is to analyze the existing methods, to evaluate their use in virtual reality
environments and to evaluate the viability of a new method based on a GPU Raycasting for obtaining real-time
haptic interaction without requiring a preprocess of the volumetric data. The new approach will be tested in a
planification of a bone surgery. Note that the simulation does not involve just touching the bone but also visualizing
the cut.