SBIR Phase I: Enabling Natural Tactile Interaction Across the Internet

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to enable the creation of new consumer products that incorporate tactile fingertip sensing and tactile fingertip display, thereby bridging the digital divide and having a positive impact on society. One application is touch-enabled content sharing, which will let users download and feel objects that are beyond the reach of most people, such as a stone from the moon or a newborn lion cub. The envisioned technology will also have immediate relevance for consumers by enabling a richer e-commerce experience, where buyers not only see but also can touch what they plan to purchase. Other likely commercial impacts are to improve gaming and virtual reality systems, to add interpersonal touch communication to video chat applications, and to capture and analyze surface properties for industrial applications such as remote materials characterization and product inspection. This project will also provide insights on how currently available consumer electronic components can be used to enable next-generation computer interfaces and wearable tactile devices that enable unhindered use of the human finger. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to enable high quality tactile communication between two human beings across time and distance, essentially to make it possible to feel what another person is touching across the digital divide. The research team will address the essential questions of (1) how to record what the fingertip feels when touching a broad range of surfaces and (2) how to convincingly replicate these diverse tactile sensations for another individual to feel. The intellectual merit of this project lies with the strong research team and the focus on next generation haptic technologies that combine several different tactile input data types and output modalities, rather than just a single sensation type. Specific contributions of this work will include the design of a wearable sending unit that accurately captures the broad-bandwidth experience of natural touch-based interactions with real object surfaces and the design of a stationary receiving unit that re-creates these sensations at the fingertip of another person. Determining the efficacy of this approach will improve society?s understanding of the way in which humans process certain types of tactile signals and will advance scientific knowledge of human tactile interactions.