Touch In Virtual Environments

Touch in Virtual Environments

Haptics: The state-of-the-art in building touch-based interfaces for virtual environments. -- Key research issues: model acquisition, contact detection, force feedback, compression, capture, and collaboration. -- Understanding the role of human factors in haptic interfaces. -- Applications: medical training, telesurgery, biological and scientific interfaces, military applications, sign language, museum display, and more. Haptics -- "touch-based" interface design -- is the exciting new frontier in research on virtual and immersive environments. In Touch in Virtual Environments, the field's leading researchers bring together their most advanced work and applications. They identify the key challenges facing haptic interface developers, present today's best solutions, and outline a clear research agenda for the future. This book draws upon work first presented at the breakthrough haptics conference held recently at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center. The editors and contributors begins by reviewing key haptics applications and the challenges of effective haptic rendering, presenting new insights into model acquisition, contact detection, force feedback, compression, capture, collaboration, and other key issues. Next, they focus on the complex human factors associated with successful haptic interfaces, examining questions such as: How can we make haptic displays more usable for blind and visually impaired users? What are the differences between perceiving texture with the bare skin and with a probe? In the book's final section, several of today's leading haptic applications are introduced, including telesurgery and surgical simulation; scientific visualization.

Social Touch in Human–Robot Interaction

In this book for researchers and students, editors Shiomi and Sumioka bring together contributions from researchers working on the CREST project at ATR Deep Interaction Laboratories, a world leader in social robotics, to comprehensively describe robot touch systems from hardware to applications. Appropriate touch from robots to humans is essential for social robots, but achieving this requires various solutions at every stage of the touch process. Through this book, readers will gain an understanding of the needs, essential systems and communication cues, behaviour designs, and real‐world issues for social touch applications. This book compiles and updates technical and empirical research that was previously scattered throughout the literature into a single volume. Through individually authored chapters addressing various elements of ATR’s CREST project, this book tackles key areas where understanding is needed to realize acceptable touch interaction, including pre‐touch interaction, interaction design for touching and being touched, behaviour changes caused by touch interaction, and applications of social touch interaction. It introduces a touch sensor and robots developed by the authors, including several touch‐related behaviours and design policies. This approach will enable readers to easily apply this knowledge to their own social robotics programs. This book is invaluable for anyone who wishes to understand and develop social robots that physically interact with people. It is most beneficial for researchers and upper undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of human–robot/agent/computer interaction and social touch interaction and those in the broader fields of engineering, computer science, and cognitive science.

Social touch