Haptic Rendering of Earthquake Maps 
Integrated Media Systems Center Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA 2001

?	Authors: Professors (alphabetical)
?	Joćo P. Hespanha (Department of Electrical Engineering, USC)
?	Margaret McLaughlin (Annenberg School of Communication, USC)
?	Gaurav S. Sukhatme (Department of Computer Science, USC)

?	Authors: Research Assistants (alphabetical)
?	Rajiv Garg (Software Architecture, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence)
?	Funding provided by: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Abstract
The sense of touch can create a feeling of immersion in virtual environments. This sense modality provides a tangible experience of the world even to users who are without sight. We use this sense of touch (from the Greek, haptikos) to bring about the perception of the physical features of the surface topography of the earth and of its surface motion (earthquakes), giving the feel for the intensity and frequency of earthquakes that occurred in the past, such as the Northridge quake. The system will be built to support full voice interaction with the system including query of its databases by its voice command. In this paper we address the approach the used to generate the 3D map for the haptic interface from a simple 2Dsurface features map. The coordinated environment provides for a complete interaction between the necessary data relating to the map and the speech interface module. Here we register all the data available for a certain region to the visual 3D map, thus giving proper control signals for haptic interface.