Haptics: Understanding Active Touch Sensing Technology
An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays.
Haptics, or haptic sensing, refers to the ability to identify and perceive objects through touch. This is active touch, involving exploration of an object with the hand rather than the passive sensing of a vibration or force on the skin. The development of new technologies, including prosthetic hands and tactile surfaces for flat screen displays, depends on our knowledge of haptics.
Comprehensive Coverage of Touch Technology
This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series provides an accessible overview of haptics and its applications. The book explains that haptics involves integrating information from touch and kinesthesia—information both from sensors in the skin and from sensors in muscles, tendons, and joints. The challenge for technology is to reproduce in a virtual world some of the sensations associated with physical interactions with the environment.
What You'll Learn
The book maps the building blocks of the tactile system, the receptors in the skin and the skin itself, and how information is processed at this interface with the external world. Topics covered include:
- Haptic perception and processing of haptic information in the brain
- Haptic illusions and distorted perceptions of objects and the body
- Tactile and haptic displays, from braille to robotic systems
- Tactile compensation for other sensory impairments
- Surface haptics creating virtual haptic effects on touch screens
- Development of robotic and prosthetic hands that mimic human hand properties
Expert Author
Lynette A. Jones is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
