Toward the haptic interaction in daily life

Abstract

It is common that usual people rarely have chance to experience emerging technologies. It is also true to the haptic research area. In spite of its several decades of haptic research history, usual people is not familiar with haptic display systems. To make things worse, they have little motivation to use artificial and active haptic signals in their daily lives. In this chapter, three different research systems will be described to broaden the applicability of haptic display systems. Those systems are designed to encourage people using “haptic displays”. The first is named SmartTool that intended to enable augmented reality of haptics. The system is capable of changing the haptic feeling of actual objects in a real world, to support manual task and to entertain people. The second system is Tactile Flight Display, to support pilot’s task by reducing visual workload. By using this system, the pilot could perceive flight related information through their haptic feeling. While using this system, they can keep the aircraft within a certain altitude based on flight information provided through their haptic feeling. At the same time, the pilot could watch outside for surveillance, not visual instruments inside. The last one is stravigation, a vibrotactile navigation system to entertain usual people. By reducing visual information and providing navigational information through haptic feeling, people could free from watching their navigation device when they walk around unknown place. That contributes to improving the quality of experience of sightseeing. In addition, this method also succeeded in users to feel some sort of sense of delight while they are walking with this navigation system.