Nowadays the World Wide Web increasingly provides rich multimedia contents to its users.In order to further enhance the experience of web-users, researchers have sought solutions to integrate yet another modality into the web experience by augmenting web content with haptic properties. In those applications, users are able to interact with web virtual environments (such as games and e-learning systems) enriched with haptic contents. However, it is not easy for designers without pro cient web programming background and basic knowledge regarding haptics, to develop a web application with haptic content enabled. Additionally, there is currently no standard to describe and reuse a well-described haptic application which can be played in web browsers. In this thesis, I present an MPEG-V based authoring tool for facilitating the development procedure of haptics-enabled web applications. The system provides an interface for users to create their own application, add custom 3D models, and modify their graphic and haptic properties. Haptic properties include the speci cation of collision detection mechanism and object surface properties which in turn directly a ect the force simulations. Finally, the user is able to export a haptic-enabled 3D scene in a standard MPEG-V format which can be reconstructed in a web haptic player. A detailed experiment is conducted to evaluate the force simulations, application development process and design of user interface. The results not only verify my proposed methodology, but also show the high acceptance level by users with all levels of programming knowledge of the system.

Nowadays the World Wide Web increasingly provides rich multimedia contents to its users.In order to further enhance the experience of web-users, researchers have sought solutions to integrate yet another modality into the web experience by augmenting web content with haptic properties. In those applications, users are able to interact with web virtual environments (such as games and e-learning systems) enriched with haptic contents. However, it is not easy for designers without pro cient web programming background and basic knowledge regarding haptics, to develop a web application with haptic content enabled. Additionally, there is currently no standard to describe and reuse a well-described haptic application which can be played in web browsers. In this thesis, I present an MPEG-V based authoring tool for facilitating the development procedure of haptics-enabled web applications. The system provides an interface for users to create their own application, add custom 3D models, and modify their graphic and haptic properties. Haptic properties include the speci cation of collision detection mechanism and object surface properties which in turn directly a ect the force simulations. Finally, the user is able to export a haptic-enabled 3D scene in a standard MPEG-V format which can be reconstructed in a web haptic player. A detailed experiment is conducted to evaluate the force simulations, application development process and design of user interface. The results not only verify my proposed methodology, but also show the high acceptance level by users with all levels of programming knowledge of the system.