Haptic Neural Fields: Bringing Tactile Interactions to 3D Rendered Scenes

Antonio Luigi Stefani, Niccolò Bisagno, Nicola Conci, Eckehard Steinbach, Francesco De Natale; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 16021-16030

We address the problem of making 3D scenes interactive by asking: what would objects feel like if touched in a virtual environment? While neural scene representations achieve high visual realism, they fall short in modeling physical interactions, such as the vibration patterns produced when surfaces are explored with different actions. We propose a framework that learns the correspondence between scene, user action, and haptic response, enabling the generation of tactile signals from simulated interactions in 3D scenes. Our approach leverages a neural field representation conditioned on geometry information and interaction dynamics to synthesize material-specific vibrotactile signals. Experiments show that the generated signals reliably convey both material properties and the user action. This paves the way toward interactive, touch-aware virtual environments with realistic haptic feedback. Project page available here.