A parallel cable-driven haptic interface is designed to allow interaction with any type of virtual object. This paper presents and analyzes computational methods for addressing the issues regarding human safety and control reliability using such an interface, thereby ensuring safe operations inside the virtual world. Four strategies are explored: sensor reliability, mechanical interference management, workspace management and human-robot interaction. This paper focuses mainly on the sensors’ reliability and workspace management algorithms for a parallel cable-driven haptic interface that imposes special requirements on the control architecture design. One challenging task is to develop efficient computational algorithms for hard real-time processes included in haptic display applications which improve safety without compromising performance.