Abstract
Haptic applications have received enormous attention in the last decade. Nonetheless, the diversity of haptic interfaces, virtual environment modeling, and rendering algorithms have made the development of hapto-visual applications a tedious and time consuming task that requires significant programming skills. To tackle this problem, we present a HAML-based Authoring Tool (HAMLAT), an authoring tool based on the HAML description language that allows users to render the graphics and haptics of a virtual environment with no programming skills. The modeler is able to export the developed application in a standard HAML description format. The proposed system comprises three components: the authoring tool (HAMLAT), the HAML engine, and the HAML player. The tool is implemented by extending the 3D Blender modeling platform to support haptic interaction. The demonstrated tool proves the simplicity and efficiency of prototyping haptic applications for non-programmer developers or artists.