A brief technical note on haptic jellyfish with Falcon and OpenGL

The ultimate goal of the project is to have a fully-tangible 3D interactive responsive jellyfish character, a work inspired by nature. We begin with a real-time physically simulated 2D prototype jellyfish that swims about and classically the users can just "drag" it around using a mouse. This work augments the interaction model with the attachment of the Novint Falcon haptic device that the jellyfish itself can "move" through the calculation of internal forces as we accumulate them for each of its particles, one of which serves as a guide particle to send the force coefficients to Falcon. The idea is to "feel" the weight and push of the jellyfish as it moves along and interact with it to change its direction. The subsequent work will focus on augmenting the bell of the jellyfish to 3D and more realistic tentacles. All are done in affordable Falcon and OpenGL. The jellyfish itself is based on the elastic real-time two-layer softbody simulation framework.