An encountered-type haptic interface generates touch sensation only when a user's hand “encounters” virtual objects. This paper presents an effective encountered-type haptic interface that enables rendering of surfaces with variable curvature. The key idea is to systematically bend a thin elastic plate so as to create a curved surface with desired curvature, which becomes a contacting end effector that follows the user's finger and becomes an interface a user can touch when needed. The pose of the curvature is controlled in a way that it corresponds to the curved surfaces of virtual objects and user's finger position. The idea is realized by attaching two commercial haptic interfaces to both edges of a thin acryl plate and squeezing the plate. This setup allows us to generate a cylindrical object with curvature up to 0.035 mm-1 and gives 3DOF position control and 1DOF rotational control of the curved surface. Achievable workspace and curvature range are analyzed, and the feasibility and physical performance are demonstrated through a visuo-haptic grabbing scenario. In addition, a psychophysical experiment shows perceptual competence of the proposed system.

This paper reports the use of haptic augmented reality in breast tumor palpation. In general, lumps in the breast are stiffer than surrounding tissues, allowing us to haptically detect them through self-palpation. The goal of the study is to assist self-palpation of lumps by haptically augmenting stiffness around lumps. The key steps are to estimate non-linear stiffness of normal tissues in the offline preprocessing step, detect areas that show abnormally stiffer responses, and amplify the difference in stiffness through a haptic augmented reality interface. The performance of the system was evaluated in a user-study, demonstrating the potential of the system.

Multi-sensory communications with haptics attract a number of researchers in recent years. To provide services of the communications with high realistic sensations, the researchers focus on the quality of service (QoS) control, which keeps as high quality as possible, and the quality of experience (QoE) assessment, which is carried out to investigate the influence on user perception and to verify the effectiveness of QoS control. In this paper, we report the present status of studies on multi-sensory communications with haptics. Then, we divide applications of the communications into applications in virtual environments and those in real environments, and we mainly describe collaborative work and competitive work in each of the virtual and real environments. We also explain QoS control which is applied to the applications and QoE assessment carried out in them. Furthermore, we discuss the future directions of studies on multi-sensory communications.

The development of new technologies has undoubtedly promoted the advances of modern education, among which Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have made the education more visually accessible for students. However, classroom education has been the focus of VR applications whereas not much research has been done in promoting sports education using VR technologies. In this paper, an immersive VR system is designed and implemented to create a more intuitive and visual way of teaching tennis. A scalable system architecture is proposed in addition to the hardware setup layout, which can be used for various immersive interactive applications such as architecture walkthroughs, military training simulations, other sports game simulations, interactive theaters, and telepresent exhibitions. Realistic interaction experience is achieved through accurate and robust hybrid tracking technology, while the virtual human opponent is animated in real time using shader-based skin deformation. Potential future extensions are also discussed to improve the teaching/learning experience.

This paper presents the development of a sound–specific vibration interface and its evaluation results by playing three commercial games with the interface. The proposed interface complements the pitfalls of existing frequency–based vibration interfaces such as vibrating headsets, mouses, and joysticks. Those interfaces may bring negative user experiences by generating incessant vibrations because they vibrate in response to certain sound frequencies. But the proposed interface which responds to only target sounds can improve user experiences effectively. The hardware and software parts of the interface are described; the structure and the implementation of a wrist pad that delivers vibration are discussed. Furthermore, we explain a sound-matching algorithm that extracts sound characteristics and a GUI-based pattern editor that helps users to design vibration patterns. The results from evaluating the performance show that the success ratio of the sound matching is over 90% at the volume of 20 dB and the delay time is around 400 msec. In the survey about user experiences, the users evaluates that the interface is more than four times effective in improving the reality of game playing than without using the vibration interfaces, and two times than the frequency–based ones.

For tactile feedback in mobile devices, the size and the power consumption of tactile modules are the dominant factors. Thus, vibration motors have been widely used in mobile devices to provide tactile sensation. However, the vibration motor cannot sufficiently generate a great amount of tactile sensation because the magnitude and the frequency of the vibration motor are coupled. For the generation of a wide variety of tactile sensations, this paper presents a new tactile actuator that incorporates a solenoid, a permanent magnet and an elastic spring. The feedback force in this actuator is generated by elastic and electromagnetic force. This paper also proposes a tiny tactile module with the proposed actuators. To construct a tiny tactile module, the contactor gap of the module is minimized without decreasing the contactor stroke, the output force, and the working frequency. The elastic springs of the actuators are separated into several layers to minimize the contactor gap without decreasing the performance of the tactile module. Experiments were conducted to investigate each contactor output force as well as the frequency response of the proposed tactile module. Each contactor of the tactile module can generate enough output force to stimulate human mechanoreceptors. As the contactors are actuated in a wide range of frequency, the proposed tactile module can generate various tactile sensations. Moreover, the size of the proposed tactile module is small enough to be embedded it into a mobile device, and its power consumption is low. Therefore, the proposed tactile actuator and module have good potential in many interactive mobile devices.

We present an interactive system for cosmetic makeup of a point-based face model acquired by 3D scanners. We first enhance the texture of a face model in 3D space using low-pass Gaussian filtering, median filtering, and histogram equalization. The user is provided with a stereoscopic display and haptic feedback, and can perform simulated makeup tasks including the application of foundation, color makeup, and lip gloss. Fast rendering is achieved by processing surfels using the GPU, and we use a BSP tree data structure and a dynamic local refinement of the facial surface to provide interactive haptics. We have implemented a prototype system and evaluated its performance.

In this paper, we demonstrate an immersive and interactive broadcasting production system with a new haptically enhanced multimedia broadcasting chain. The system adapts Augmented Reality (AR) techniques, which merges captured videos and virtual 3D media seamlessly through multimedia streaming technology, and haptic interaction technology in near real-time. In this system, viewers at the haptic multimedia client can interact with AR broadcasting production transmitted via communication network. We demonstrate two test applications, which show that the addition of AR- and haptic-interaction to the conventional audio-visual contents can improve immersiveness and interactivity of viewers with rich contents service.