Haptics Rendering and Applications

Abstract

Society is becoming based on information gathering, manipulation, and dissemination. We are witnessing an ever-growing and evolving content delivery market accompanied by significant restructuring worldwide. Such continuous changes reflect the need for specialization of new content, dynamic access to content to enable timely reaction, flexible delivery, customized presentation structures, interactivity, and collaboration. These changes are caused and enabled by the transformation in the delivery mode from paper to electronic media formats and the growing trends towards interactive services delivering information in full accordance with the declared interests of the end-user. Haptics, a term that was derived from the Greek verb “haptesthai”, meaning “to touch”, refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. This word was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by researchers in the field of experimental psychology to refer to the active touch of real objects by humans. In the late nineteen eighties, the term was redefined to enlarge its scope and to include all aspects of machine touch and human-machine touch interaction. The ‘touching’ of objects can be by humans, machines, or a combination of both; the environment can be real, virtual, or a combination of both. Currently, the term has brought together many disciplines including biomechanics, psychology, neurophysiology, engineering, and computer science to refer to the study of human touch and force feedback with the external environment.