  Haptic rendering enables people to touch, perceive, and manipulate virtual
objects in a virtual environment. Using six cascaded identical hollow disk
electromagnets and a small permanent magnet attached to an operator's finger,
this paper proposes and develops an untethered haptic interface through
magnetic field control. The concentric hole inside the six cascaded
electromagnets provides the workspace, where the 3D position of the permanent
magnet is tracked with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. The driving currents of six
cascaded electromagnets are calculated in real-time for generating the desired
magnetic force. Offline data from an FEA (finite element analysis) based
simulation, determines the relationship between the magnetic force, the driving
currents, and the position of the permanent magnet. A set of experiments
including the virtual object recognition experiment, the virtual surface
identification experiment, and the user perception evaluation experiment were
conducted to demonstrate the proposed system, where Microsoft HoloLens
holographic glasses are used for visual rendering. The proposed magnetic haptic
display leads to an untethered and non-contact interface for natural haptic
rendering applications, which overcomes the constraints of mechanical linkages
in tool-based traditional haptic devices.
