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With the growth of virtual reality setups, digital sculpting tools become more and more immersive. It is now possible to create a piece of art within a virtual environment, directly with the controllers. However, these devices do not allow to touch the virtual material as a sculptor would do. To tackle this issue we investigate in this paper the use of a tangible surface that could be used in virtual reality setups. We designed a low-cost prototype composed of two layers of sensors in order to measure a wide range of pressure. We also propose two mapping techniques to fit our device to a virtual 3D mesh to be sculpted. Participants of an informal test were asked to reproduce a pattern on three meshes: a plane, a sphere and a teapot. They succeeded in this task, showing the potential of our approach.

A texture rendering system relying on pseudo-haptic and audio feedback is presented in this paper. While the user touches the texture displayed on a tactile screen, the associated image is deformed according to the contact area and the rubbing motion to simulate pressure. Additionally audio feedback is synthesized in real-time to simulate friction. A novel example-based scheme takes advantage of recorded audio samples of friction between actual textures and a finger at several speeds to synthesize the final output sound. This system can be implemented on any existing tactile screen without any extra mechanical device.