Haptic interaction is an increasingly common form of interaction in virtual environment (VE) simulations. This medium introduces some new challenges. In this paper we study the problem arising from the difference between the sampling rate requirements of haptic interfaces and the significantly lower update rates of the physical models being manipulated. We propose a multirate simulation approach which uses a local linear approximation. The treatment includes a detailed analysis and experimental verification of the approach. The proposed method is also shown to improve the stability of the haptic interaction.