Introduction
Haptics is the sense of touch, experiencing the force or it is all about combining both the cutaneous sense and the kinesthetic sense. Haptics is the science of touch; it’s how we interface with the world in many aspects.
Sense of touch
Sense of touch is really important. It’s involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, and anything you do in the world. So, the sense of touch is pretty interesting. Let us start with what is haptics. For vision, the eye is the organ; a basis of our vision, and Light is a basic fundamental stimulus for it. For Hearing, the ear is the organ and the fundamental stimulus is a Pressure wave or sound. Similarly, for haptics, skin is the organ (for the time being just imagine skin is the organ), and the fundamental stimulus is a force, the contact force.
The other organs do not need to have contact, whereas here contact is very important. This is a crude introduction to what haptics is; we are going to refine it. The word touch, we have been using very often; what is touch? Touch is a slightly complicated word. Touch has two aspects of it; one is the sensory point of view of touch, for example, I am touching this object, and then feeling the object that is a sensory part of it.
Another aspect of the touch is that I am manipulating this object; not just sensing it I am manipulating this specific object. In the sensory aspect of the touch, there are many dimensions to it sensory dimension itself; one of the dimensions is the tactile sense; tactile senses that are a technical word for the feeling of pressure, and the feeling of fine touch.
The other dimensions
The secondary dimension is the sense of temperature, cold or warm or heat, etc. The third dimension is pain. It may be a surprise for many of you; pain is also a part of the touch. Usually, we do not consider; pain as a part of the touch right, but it is a third dimension of the touch. The fourth dimension is called the kinesthetic sense. Touch has two main components. The first are tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin. And the second is kinesthetic sensations. This has to do with the position of your body and how it’s moving, and the forces you encounter. And you’re good at incorporating both of these types of sensations together to understand the physical interactions you have with the world and understand as you touch a surface.
Ultra-haptics
Ultra-haptics is about how we create a sense of touch in midair so we can create buttons and sliders and switches or even virtual objects in midair that we can touch that don’t exist. How we can do this by using ultrasonic transducers an array of them where we can change the amplitude and phase of all the transducers individually which means that we can bring all the sound waves to this a single point at the same time which creates a high-pressure level that you can feel on your skin now the skin can’t respond to ultrasonics it only responds to frequencies of 0 to 500 Hertz so we will modulate the ultra-sonics at a frequency around 2 to 400 Hertz which creates a sense of touch now if you touch a surface you don’t feel anything but if you slide your hand across it you can feel the texture of that simply by the vibrations that come off that piece of material or that piece of wood or whatever you’re touching and we can recreate that in midair by how we modulate the ultrasonic technology and so, it allows us to create not only the sense of touch but a sense of texture and able to recreate things that you wouldn’t normally be able to recreate.
Advantages of Haptic Technology
Whether a new invention is made the debate whether it will settle, whether people will accept it or not, never settles. Haptic technology will bring revolution as it would create a special type of communication especially focused on the sense of touch. Moreover, it would be a nice step to talk with the machines.
Posts you may find interesting
Haptic Technology: The Future of Engagement?
Everything you need to know about haptic technology – D-BOX
What Are Haptics? Meaning, Types, and Importance
About
The article was written and optimized by Omar Azhar. He’s an SEO Blog writer and a web developer. Refer to my LinkedIn profile for more details.
