Haptics in virtual reality and multimedia

Imagine that you're chatting with a good friend who tells you about her new cashmere pullover, and that you're able to touch it and appreciate the soft sensation of the cashmere wool - remotely over the Web in your virtual chatroom! In this article, the authors present their work on haptic sensing of virtual textiles. This is work done in the context of the Haptex research project that aims at integrating the human sense of touch into multimodal user interfaces. Being able to support haptic perception in the user interface will be a great step toward next-generation immersive multimedia experiences