The Open Source Haptics Project

CHAI 3D is an open source, freely available set of C++ libraries for computer haptics, visualization and interactive real-time simulation. CHAI 3D supports several commercially-available three- and six-degree-of-freedom haptic devices, and makes it simple to support new custom force feedback devices. CHAI 3D is especially suitable for education and research purposes, offering a light platform on which extensions can be developed. CHAI 3D's support for multiple haptic devices also makes it easy to send your applications to remote sites that may use different hardware.

In short, CHAI 3D takes an important step toward developer-friendly creation of multimodal virtual worlds, by tightly integrating the haptic and visual representations of objects and by abstracting away the complexities of individual haptic devices.

Features

  • OpenGL-based mono or stereo graphics
  • Graphic and haptic rendering and collision-detection for triangle meshes
  • Importing of model files in .obj and .3ds format
  • Haptic proxy for smooth interaction with surfaces
  • A virtual haptic device, for running and testing haptic applications when a physical device is not available
  • Communication with several digital/analog I/O boards
  • Integration with ActiveX for web-embedded haptic applications
  • Integration with ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) for haptic interaction with rigid body simulations (beta)

Supported Hardware

  • Force Dimension DELTA and OMEGA haptic devices
  • SensAble PHANToM haptic devices
  • MPB Freedom 6S haptic devices
  • Stereo glasses
  • Servotogo boards
  • Sensoray626 boards

Supported Environments

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 6
  • Microsoft Visual Studio .net
  • Borland C++ Builder
  • Cygwin / gcc
  • Linux / gcc (beta)

Downloading CHAI 3D

You can download CHAI 3D from the downloads page. The provided zipfile includes complete source, plus project files, examples, and compiled libraries for MSVC 6.0, MSVC.net, and Borland C++ 6.0.