Touching the Past: Haptic Augmented Reality for Museum Artefacts

In this paper we propose a novel interaction technique that creates the illusion of tactile exploration of museum artefacts which are otherwise impossible to touch. The technique meets the contextual necessity, often requested by museum curators, to background technology and to direct the focus of the museum visitor’s experience to the artefact itself. Our approach relies on the combination of haptic interaction and the adaptation of a well-known illusion that enables museum visitors to make sense of the actual physical non-touchable artefact in an embodied way, using their sensory and motor skills. We call this technique Haptic Augmented Reality.