the Center of Rehabilitation Engineering in Lund, Sweden, Sjostrom (Sjostrom, 1997) and his colleagues have created a painting application in which the PHANToM can be used by the visually impaired; line thickness varies with the user's force on the fingertip thimble and colors are discriminated by their tactual profile. Marcy, Temkin, Gorman, and Krummel (1998) have developed the Tactile Max, a PHANToM plug-in for 3D Studio Max. Dynasculpt, a prototype from Interval Research Corporation (Snibbe, Anderson, and Verplank, 1998) permits sculpting in three dimensions by attaching a virtual mass to the PHANToM position and constructing a ribbon through the mass's path through the 3D space. Gutierrez, Barbero, Aizpitarte, Carrillo, and Eguidazu (1998) have integrated the PHANToM into DATum, a geometric modeller. Objects can be touched, moved, or grasped (with two PHANToMs), and the assembly/disassembly of mechanical objects can be simulated. Haptics has also been incorporated into scientific visualization. Drubeck, Macias, Weinstein, Johnson, and Hollerbach (1998) have interfaced SCIrun, a computation software steering system, to the PHANToM. Both haptics and graphics displays are directed by the movement of the PHANToM stylus through haptically rendered data volumes. Similar systems have been developed for geoscientific applications (e.g., the Haptic Workbench, Veldkamp, Truner, Gunn, and Stevenson, 1998), Green and Salisbury (1998) have produced a convincing soil simulation (Green and Salisbury, 1998) where they have varied parameters such as soil properties, plow blade geometry, and angle of attack. At Interactive Simulations, a San Diego-based company, researchers have succeeded in adding a haptic feedback component to Sculpt, a program for analyzing chemical and biological molecular structures, which will permit analysis of molecular conformational flexibility and interactive docking. Acquisition of 3D modelsThere are several commercial 3...
