Haptic interfaces are devices that allow human-machine interaction through force and touch. Combined haptic and visual interfaces have been around for decades. Yet, despite an enormous increase in research activity in the last few years, the science of haptics is still a technology in its infancy. The majority of commercially available haptic devices operate based on a principle of point intera...

The haptic hand is a greatly simplified robotic hand that is designed to mirror the human hand and provide haptic force feedback for applications in music. The “fingers” of the haptic hand device are laid out to align with four of the fingers of the human hand. A key is placed on each of the “fingers” so that a human hand can perform music by interacting with the keys. The haptic hand is distin...

The development of haptic technology is allowing the introduction of Virtual Reality systems as teaching and working tools into many fields such as engineering (Howard & Vance, 2007; Savall et al., 2002) or surgery (Basdogan et al., 2004; Li & Liu, 2006). Haptic devices allow users to interact with a certain environment, either remote or virtual, through the sense of touch, considerably enhanci...

In this paper, we introduce Haptic-Emoticon, which is used in a text message. It expresses a writer’s emotion and/or decorates the message with physical stimulus on a reader’s skin. We employ stroking motions for that purpose. The motions are represented as a 2D trajectory so that a writer can create the Haptic-Emoticon with a conventional pointing input device. The input line is recorded as an...

Sightlence is a haptic game interface translation of Pong. The goal of the game design was to answer the question if it’s possible to design computer games that only communicate through the haptic modality, if it’s possible to translate classic computer games to the haptic modality, and if it can be accomplished with ordinary gamepads. The two-fold purpose of answering these questions was to ex...

This study demonstrates that when people attempt to identify a facial expression of emotion (FEE) by haptically exploring a 3D facemask, they are affected by viewing a simultaneous, task-irrelevant visual FEE portrayed by another person. In comparison to a control condition, where visual noise was presented, the visual FEE facilitated haptic identification when congruent (visual and haptic FEEs...

This paper examines the properties of haptic communication between two human operators using kinesthetic haptic devices in a collaborative task in a virtual environment. Twenty subjects, divided into 10 dyads, participated in a 2D pointing task. Each dyad consisted of a supervisor and an acting agent. The supervisor’s role was to guide the acting agent towards a target in the virtual environmen...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the simulation of the haptic interface device utilizing the admittance control method for the applications of human/virtual environment interaction. . The dynamics of the haptic interface is derived, and then it is integrated with the admittance interaction loop. In doing so, firstly, the haptic device is simulated and the design of it is done through...

Recent advances in distributed virtual reality systems and haptic technologies provide new opportunities to augment human sense of touch into highly complex and immersive visual simulations. Haptic feedback further enhances human immersion into virtual environments. We present techniques for portable and distributed rendering of real-time active and passive stereo views of virtual granular mate...

Motor skills transfer is a challenging issue for many applications such as surgery, design and industry. In order to design virtual environments that support motor skills learning, a deep understanding of humans’ haptic interactions is required. To ensure skills transfer, experts and novices need to collaborate. This requires the construction of the common frame of reference between the teacher...