Keynote Speaker Tactile Reality

Touching an object causes rich haptic cues that enable you to understand the object's physical properties and adeptly control the interaction. Although human experience centers on physical contact with tangible items, few computer systems provide the user with high-fidelity touch feedback, limiting their intuitiveness. Haptic interfaces are mechatronic systems that modulate the physical interaction between a human and his or her tangible surroundings. Such interfaces typically involve mechanical, electrical, and computational layers that work together to sense user motions or forces, quickly process these inputs with other information, and physically respond by actuating elements of the user's surroundings. By way of three examples, this talk will demonstrate that well-designed tactile feedback can greatly increase the realism of virtual worlds. First, we created a simple visuo-audio-tactile simulator to help dental students learn to find cavities in teeth. The user watches a video of a real dental tool interacting with a tooth while simultaneously feeling an authentic rendering of the associated contact vibrations. Second, we created the world's most realistic haptic virtual surfaces by recording and modeling what a user feels when touching 100 real objects with an instrumented stylus. The perceptual effects of displaying the resulting data-driven friction forces, tapping transients, and texture vibrations were quantified by having users compare the original surfaces to their virtual versions. Third, we extended the haptic texture concept to capture how a real robot vibrates as it moves its joints and tied this model to measured user motions. The resulting vibrotactile experiences were formally evaluated and then added to an immersive game that lets the user feel what it would be like to turn into a robot. While much work remains to be done, we are starting to see the tantalizing potential of systems that leverage tactile cues to allow a user to interact with virtual environments as though they were real.