Research
Toward holistic
digital touch experience
digital touch experience
Touch is vital for object recognition and interpersonal communication. However, direct physical contact is not always possible when people are remotely located, experiencing health issues, or are socially isolated. Cutaneous displays can make it possible to recreate and deliver touch digitally. Such technology can be used to enhance the communication experience for users of mobile devices, wearable technology, and virtual reality.
Ho Haptics Lab aims to elucidate human information processing, with a special focus on touch. Our research contributes to the realization of holistic digital touch that allows remote manual exploration and interpersonal interaction. Below are the main research directions in our lab. Students who are interested in joining the lab, please refer to the information here.
SHITSUKAN is a Japanese word whose literal meaning is the sense of quality, and it commonly refers to the quality of materials, surfaces, and objects. It plays important roles in value-based behavior selection, such as preference / aversion or emotional reaction toward objects.
Ho Haptics Lab focuses on the SHITSUKAN recognition related to touch, aiming to clarify its underlying human sensory processing and explore its applications in the engineering and design domain. The projects include:
Visual inference for warm/cold perception in natural textures
Thermal perception and multisensory integration
The ability to sense the temperature is vital to our life. It signals environmental conditions, faciliates manual exploration and object recognition, and generates the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness.
Ho Haptics Lab Invesitgates human perceptual properties of temperature perception and their interactions with touch and other sensory modalities. The objective is to provide knowledge basis for the design and development of cutaneous interfaces. The projects include:
Impact of touch on object temperature perception
Color-temperature correspondences: Its nature and its impact on temperature perception
Cutaneous displays that directly simulate the skin can be used to recreate and deliver touch digitally. Such displays will expand the capacity of current audiovisual communication systems and enhance user experiences of wearable technology and virtual reality.
Ho Haptics Lab develops cutaneous displays that assist in SHITSUKAN recognition in virtual environments. In particular by simulating the thermal cues associated with making contact with materials with different thermal properties. The projects include:
Modeling the Thermal Responses of the Skin Surface during Hand-Object Interactions
Development of Thermal Displays for Material Recognition
Infrared thermal measurement system for evaluating model-based thermal displays
Embodied communication
Temperature quality, such as warm or cold, is not just a description of physical temperature that appears in the weather forecast; it also has emotional aspects. For example, the warmth felt when a mother holds her baby is love and care; a warm and firm handshake gives people the feeling of trustworthiness.
Ho Haptics Lab examines whether physical experience of warmth and coldness can have an impact on emotion and interpersonal communication. The projects include:
Study on thermal-emotion associations
Effects of physical thermal experience on semantic processing