Haptics
With the term haptics it is intended a set of HW and SW technologies able to elicit in the humans physical perceptions through the sense of touch. Haptics is an emerging human-machine interaction technology that promises to greatly improve the communication capability with Remote and/or Virtual Worlds, adding the sense of touch to the communication channels, beside the conventional ones based on the sense of sight and hearings.
Reflecting to the humans the physical stimulations arising from the contact with virtual or remote objects allows a natural control of the interaction, during, for example, the execution of manipulative or exploration tasks. Differently from the case of visual and audio comunication, the rendering of the physical sensation relating to the sense of touch requires the set-up of a two way real-time comunication with the remote or virtual world.
Indeed, the pysical stimulations of the haptic sensorial system is a direct consequence of the actions performed on the environment.
From the technology point of view, the research is primarily focused on the identification and development of suitable sensing and actuation technologies able, from one side, to acquire the movements of the human limbs, that are fed as an input to the system, and, from the other side, to fed to the human the corresponding stimulations, as an otput from the system. The devices able to embody these two basic functionalities are named Haptic Interfaces.
Secondarily, in the case of interaction with Virtual World, the research is focused in the development of suitable mathematical models and related computing architectures and techniques, able to evaluate in real time the response of the environment to the actions of the human. The set of these SW technologies are indicated with the generic term of Haptic Rendering.