This repository contains some simple haptic demos in SOFA to use for demonstrations or university tours. It requires from a 3DSystem Haptic device. The demo has been tested using the TouchX device. It can be adapted to be used with a Novint Falcon, but it will require additional work and a different SOFA plugin.

This demo requires SOFA to be installed with some additional plugins. For this reason, it is necessary to build it from source. Follow the instructions for your OS from their official webpage Windows or Linux. During the installation, you will have to activate the Geomagic plugin and the SofaPython3 plugin. Geomagic requires from OpenHaptics, you can find how to install it from the official website or you can follow the first section of my own tutorial on how to setup the ToucX device with OpenHaptics.

Once you have SOFA installed, I recommend installing Miniconda3 to handle the different Python packages. First, add the SofaPython3 site-packages to the $PYTHONPATH so any of your python executable has access to the libraries. If you are using Linux, use the following commands to add it to the ~/.bashrc file:

echo "export PYTHONPATH=/pathtoSofa/lib/python3/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH" >> ~/.bashrc
conda create -n pySOFA python=3.9 -y
conda activate pySOFA
pip install -r requirements.txt

Open a terminal, activate the pySOFA conda environment and run the python file. python pathtofolder/haptic_demo.py.

1. SOFA
2. SofaPython3
3. SoftRobots plugin
4. OpenHaptics