About Haptics

Haptics involves the modality of touch and the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring a virtual object, such as a three-dimensional model of a porcelain vase from a museum, a tactile map, or a graphic designer's rendering of an imaginary object. At IMSC we use haptic devices that provide force feedback to the user's fingers, simulating the sensory experiences that the actual, physical object would generate if the user were to touch it. The image on the right, below, shows a researcher at IMSC exploring the surface of a digitized daguerreotype case from the collection of the Seaver Center for Western Culture at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. The image on the left shows a researcher calibrating the CyberGrasp, a whole-hand force-feedback glove that can be used to grasp virtual objects. A network of "tendons" transmits grasp forces back to the user's fingers. A visitor to the Haptic Museum can use these devices locally at a desktop or remotely over the Internet, retrieving models of the museum objects from our Web site.

Figure 1 (a) Researcher calibrating the CyberGrasp force-feedback glove. (b) Researcher moving the PHANToM stylus over the surface of a digitized daguerreotype case (see inset) from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

In our most recent work we have addressed ourselves to haptic collaboration, in which users with the same and even different haptic devices, such as a glove and a stylus, can not only manipulate and explore the same virtual objects over the Internet, but can also make realistic touch contact with one another.

Figure 2. Mutual touch over the Internet: CyberGrasp user, represented by the hand, experiences touch of the PHANToM user, represented by the red ball, as grasp forces exerted against her finger.

Our mission is to develop device-independent haptic collaboration such that someone from a museum curatorial staff can interact with a student in a remote classroom and together they can jointly examine an ancient pot or bronze figure, note its interesting contours and textures, and consider such questions as "What is the mark at the base of this pot?" or "Why does is this side rough and that side smooth?" In short, haptics can be used to allow museum visitors to explore objects in ways that cannot be permitted in physical museums due to concerns about breakage and deterioration of the object surface.

Although in the main our efforts have been directed toward exploration of art objects, we are also interested in extending our work to haptic exploration of objects in other cultural heritage domains, and into visualization more generally. Further, we are currently attempting to modify our interfaces to make them accessible for the visually impaired, and to that end have formed a partnership with the Los Angeles-based Foundation for the Junior Blind. As a prototype we are developing a earthquake mapping system which will allow persons with impaired vision to query the system through speech recognition techniques and to "feel" the intensity of historical seismic events through the haptic interface.

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