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

We address the problem of making 3D scenes interactive by asking: what would objects feel like if touched in a virtual environment? State-of-the-art 3D rendering methods provide compelling visual realism, but they fall short in modeling physical interactions, such as haptic feedback. We propose a framework that learns the correspondence between user actions and tactile responses, enabling the generation of touch-based signals directly from simulated interactions in 3D scenes. Our approach leverages a neural field representation conditioned on geometry and action to synthesize material-specific tactile signals. Experiments show that the generated signals reliably convey material properties and interaction dynamics. This paves the way toward interactive, touch-aware virtual environments with realistic haptic feedback.