For surgical training and preparations, the existing surgical virtual environments have shown great improvement However, these improvements are more in the visual aspect. The incorporation of haptics into virtual reality base surgical simulations would enhance the sense of realism greatly. To aid in the development of the haptic surgical virtual environment we have created a graphics to haptic, G₂H, virtual environment developer tool. G₂H transforms graphical virtual environments (created or imported) to haptic virtual environments without programming.

The G₂H capability has been demonstrated using the complex 3D pelvic model of Lucy 2.0, the Stanford Visible Female. The pelvis was made haptic using G₂H without any further programming effort.