The Impact of Haptic ‘Touching’ Technology on Cultural Applications

New technologies from the area of virtual reality (VR) now allow computer users to use their sense of touch to feel virtual objects. Touch is a very powerful sense but it has so far been neglected in computing. State-of-the-art haptic (or force-feedback) devices allow users to feel and touch virtual objects with a high degree of realism. An artefact’s surface properties can be modelled so that someone using a haptic device could feel it as a solid, three-dimensional object with different textures, hardness or softness. These haptic devices could have a large impact on museums. For example: making very fragile objects available to scholars, allowing visitors who live far from museums to feel objects at a distance, letting visually-impaired and blind people feel exhibits that are normally behind glass, and allowing museums to show off a range of artefacts that are currently in storage due to a lack of space. This paper describes the background to haptics, some of the possibilities of haptic technology and how they might be applied to cultural applications.