Research Summary 📃

Modern technologies are increasingly losing physical touch and accessibility as they evolve from keyboards to touchscreens to mid-air typing. 

Haptics aims to restore a sense of touch in these devices by artificially providing feedback that mimics interactions with physical objects. Such feedback is important for dexterity, realism, affective qualities and more.

As haptic technology evolves, it may one day actuate our skin comprehensively, providing spatially accurate and wide bandwidth feedback. But currently available commercial hardware is limited, especially for smaller devices and wearables.

My goal is to make the most of limited hardware by exploiting haptic illusions to render frequency-rich and realistic sensations. My application focus is on texture rendering using vibrations, which has direct applications to manipulating the characteristics of a virtual surface (e.g. creating the sensation of touching nylon or corduroy).