Haptic Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields

Abstract

The neural radiance field (NeRF) is attracting increasing attentions from researchers in various fields. While NeRF has produced visually plausible results and found its potential applications in virtual reality, users are only allowed to rotate the camera to observe the scene represented as NeRF. We study the haptic interaction with NeRF models in this paper to enable the experience of touching objects reconstructed by NeRF. Existing haptic rendering algorithms do not work well for NeRF-represented models because NeRF is often noisy. We propose a stochastic haptic rendering method to deal with the collision response between the haptic proxy and NeRF. We validate our method with complex NeRF models and experimental results show the efficacy of our proposed algorithm.