  Tactile perception stands as a critical sensory modality for human
interaction with the environment. Among various tactile sensor techniques,
optical sensor-based approaches have gained traction, notably for producing
high-resolution tactile images. This work explores gel elastomer deformation
simulation through a physics-based approach. While previous works in this
direction usually adopt the explicit material point method (MPM), which has
certain limitations in force simulation and rendering, we adopt the finite
element method (FEM) and address the challenges in penetration and mesh
distortion with incremental potential contact (IPC) method. As a result, we
present a simulator named TacIPC, which can ensure numerically stable
simulations while accommodating direct rendering and friction modeling. To
evaluate TacIPC, we conduct three tasks: pseudo-image quality assessment,
deformed geometry estimation, and marker displacement prediction. These tasks
show its superior efficacy in reducing the sim-to-real gap. Our method can also
seamlessly integrate with existing simulators. More experiments and videos can
be found in the supplementary materials and on the website:
https://sites.google.com/view/tac-ipc.
