Our vision is to expand the digital world to include the sense of touch and offer tactile experiences. In short: to enrich the digital world with tactile sensations.
Research Agenda
We explore the role of touch in human-computer interaction.
The sense of touch is the most basic human sense. Even before birth, humans use the sense of touch to explore themselves and their immediate environment. In interaction with machines, however, the tactile sense is subdued by the visual and auditory senses. This discrepancy between the need to explore the environment and the lack of tactile experiences in human-machine interaction is the motivation of our research.
For this purpose, we develop dedicated hardware in the form of vibrotactile displays. These displays contain vibration motors, often arranged as a matrix that can be controlled individually and distributed on the skin. With our software and a dedicated data format we can create and evaluate tactons, which are complex tactile patterns.
The application scope of tactile interfaces ranges from the transmission of basic information to the complete substitution of other human senses. In our research, we investigate the potentials and limitations of the tactile sense. The research interests of the group members range from fundamental research on tactile interfaces to domain-specific solutions.
Contact
We are open to all forms of inquiries, offers, and collaborations. To contact us, please use the email address below. We will get back to you as soon as possible.