The practicability of the approaches used is shown by realizing new applications in the field of robotics and haptics, including a user study that evaluates the influence of the degrees of freedom in complex haptic interactions. The penetration volume is related to the water displacement of the overlapping region, and thus corresponds to a physically motivated and continuous force. Starting with novel algorithms for optimally updating bounding volume hierarchies of objects undergoing arbitrary deformations, the author presents a new data structure that allows, for the first time, the computation of the penetration volume.