More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

Jonathan Roberts and Nigel John are doing some very impressive work on being able to touch the virtual. Their research relates to training medical students to perform operations, and developing haptic technologies to do this.

They pointed out that touch is not a single sense, we have different tactile experiences, including pain, texture and muscular change. Touch provides us with feedback on our environment, telling us if a car is passing, if a tin is heavy or if coffee is hot. It also allows us to give a value to that experience – we can tell how hot the coffee is, how fast the passing car is moving, and how full the tin is.

To reproduce these affordances with technology, we require information about vibration, temperature and force. Tactile feedback provides us with information about the surface features of objects, while force feedback provides information about weight and inertia.

Haptic devices are increasingly being incorporated into technology – examples are the wii and the Logitech iFeel mouse.