Using Haptic Interfaces for User Verification in Virtual Environments

Haptics can characterize the complex sense of touch and kinesthetic stimuli through its technology of force or tactile feedback devices. Such technology is developing fast enough to become soon another human-machine interaction similar to computer keyboard or mice. However, currently commercial haptics interfaces are expensive and are typically applied to research projects or expensive systems. Fortunately the trend of the market is forcing haptic developers to release products that can be affordable in a similar fashion as some specialized computer peripherals. Haptics aim is to allow a user to touch, feel, manipulate, create, and/or alter simulated three-dimensional objects in a virtual environment. Most of the applications are dedicated to train physical skills such as medical procedure by using desktop haptic units. These human skills can be captured to model a particular human-behavioural pattern that can be used to build a biometric recognition system. The precision of such systems is reliant on the choice of biometric identifiers. For accurate identity recognition, identifiers must be chosen so that they are unique for each individual. Conventional choices of biometric identifiers include writing style, hand geometry, as well as iris, facial, and fingerprint features. In this paper, we are interested in identity recognition based on humans' manipulation of haptic devices such as PHANToM™ [15]. The purpose of our analysis is to evaluate the information content of this data source. Hence, we assess the uniqueness of each biometric identifier.