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How far will the science of touch take us? Haptics, at work in all our technological devices, in health as well as in robotics and IT. Our virtual reality is primarily tactile, hence the importance of better understanding this tremendous sense of touch that we all have in our hands…
Let’s take a look at the most fundamental and discreet of our five senses: touch, essential to the proper development of the humans that we are, essential throughout life. Whether with the fingertips, with the tongue or on every millimeter of skin, we feel, perceive, grasp the world. We relate to others through touch, we are tactile and increasingly becoming so, even with our machines and other computing tools, thanks to the emergence and development of the science of touch. Long a poor relation of research, haptics, the science of touch (as we speak of optics or acoustics) opens up a considerable field of research, exploration and applications: in medicine, in industry and, of course, in virtual reality…
With Maud Marchal, university professor in computer science at INSA Rennes and member of IRISA (Institute for Research in Computer Science and Random Systems) and Vincent Hayward, Touch specialist, he is a professor at Sorbonne University, Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR), where since 2008, he leads a team dedicated to the study of haptic perception and the creation of tactile stimulation devices.