Smart Haptics is a technical conference focused on the commercialization of haptic technology. This year’s event will explore how haptic technologies are changing the ways in which we interpret and interact with our world – and each other.
Highlights of the 2023 program:
Since 2017, Smart Haptics has provided this growing industry with a forum dedicated to exploring the future of haptic technology. This conference encourages important conversations about emerging applications, innovative ideas, and opportunities for collaboration across the supply chain. Presentations are designed to engage and inform the haptics industry through case studies and panel discussions that provide the opportunity for attendees to both experience and explore the latest technologies and emerging applications.
Learn More About This Industry-Leading Event
Eric Acome is cofounder & CEO of Artimus Robotics. He has a background in mechanical engineering and has spent his career designing & developing actuators and motion systems. Eric is a co-inventor of the HASEL actuator technology that is the foundation of Artimus Robotics. He has authored/co-authored numerous journal papers on the subject and is an inventor on several patents. He and the Artimus team are passionate about developing the HASEL technology and the future that can be enabled by soft robotics. Artimus Robotics is proud to have delivered actuators and pilot projects to customers across a wide range of industries and around the world. Eric has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a MS & PhD in Mechanical Engineering from University of Colorado Boulder.
Simulation technologies are transforming the way we learn and interact with the world around us. I specialize in the development of technologies to bring the sensation of touch to the mixed reality tools that will shape the educational, enterprise, and entertainment tools of tomorrow.
David Parisi (PhD, NYU) is Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston. His research investigates the past, present, and future of touching with digital technologies. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) explores the technological transformations of touch necessary for the invention of touch-based computer interfaces. Opening with an examination of touch’s role in apprehending the mysteries of eighteenth century electrical machines and closing with an analysis of new computing technologies that digitally synthesize haptic sensations, Archaeologies of Touch traces the development of a technoscientific haptics across four centuries. His work on digital touch has been featured in forums such as Real Life, Internet of the Senses, Flash Forward, All in the Mind, The Correspondent, Tech Crunch, The Believer, and Vice. He is an editor at ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories and co-edited the Haptic Media Studies issue of New Media & Society.
Jacob Segil is the co-founder and CEO at Afference, creating artificial sensations through wearable neural interfaces. He leads the effort to enable the sense of touch for the spatial computing age which includes efforts in adaptive algorithms for personalized haptic sensation, tunable wearable devices, and multi-modal 3D experience design. He is a trained academic and serial entrepreneur with a deep background in neural engineering and prosthetic limb design. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado.
Joe Mullenbach is the co-founder and CEO of Fluid Reality, maker of a new extremely compact actuation technology. This technology enables fluid-filled bubbles for haptic feedback that can be controlled like pixels on a screen, winning the 2023 World Haptics "Best Demo" award. Joe was previously a senior engineer and product manager for the surface haptics startup Tanvas. He holds a PhD and MS in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University, and a BS in mechanical engineering from The University of Minnesota.
Sina Akhbari earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, specializing in MEMS/NANO, with minors in IC Devices and Dynamics. He holds over 40 publications and patents. During his Ph.D. research, he focused on the design, modeling, fabrication, and characterization of Micro-Electro Mechanical Sensors (MEMS) and actuators, including Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (pMUTs). His emphasis was on theoretical modeling, FEA simulation, and the design and fabrication of high-efficiency CMOS-compatible pMUTs for implementation in low-power handheld/wearable ultrasound devices with applications in various fields, such as motion sensing, health monitoring, therapy, and fingerprint scanning. Between 2016 and 2018, Dr. Akhbari worked on the development of MEMS ultrasound fingerprint sensor chips at TDK-InvenSense. In 2018, he co-founded UltraSense Systems, where he has been leading the sensor design and R&D team in the pursuit of revolutionary next-generation Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs).
Artimus Robotics designs and manufactures soft electric actuators as a component supplier across multiple industries
Humans have created many technologies to produce motion. Motors, gears, pistons, compressors - these inventions are remarkable achievements, yet they are all inferior to motion designs found in nature.
Rigid metal parts that pop, grind, or whine cause problems and tradeoffs that must be separately mitigated. These traditional technologies are expensive, inefficient, loud, heavy, and complex.
Instead of continuing down the path of slow and rigid metal-based technology, humans should leverage nature’s hard work and develop soft motion technologies more similar to natural muscles.
Robotics and automation technologies have demonstrated rapid advances in software, vision, and control, but the enabling hardware technology has not kept up. These advances have opened the door to virtual worlds, yet our methods of interacting with those virtual worlds are primitive.
HE FUTURE OF MOTION
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Artimus Robotics offers smart, silent, lifelike motion for the next generation of automation, medical devices, automotive applications, and consumer products. We can automate your most difficult motion challenges.
Bio Coming Soon
Nicholas Colonnese is a Research Science Director at Meta Reality Labs Research, working on novel interfaces for augmented and virtual reality. He leads a multidisciplinary haptic displays program, which includes researchers with expertise in materials, actuation, rendering algorithms, perception, interaction design, and haptic value evaluation. His mission is to bring the sense of touch to the metaverse. He is an active member of several academic and industrial communities, including Haptics Symposium, World Haptics, UIST, CHI, ISWC, SIGGRAPH, Smart Haptics, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
My bio: Hong Z. Tan is an educator, scientist, technologist, and entrepreneur. She is best known for her research on haptics psychophysics, taking a perception-based approach to developing haptic interfaces. Throughout her academic career, Hong has kept a close tie with industry through her consulting activities, a four-year stint at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, and currently as a lead haptics scientist at Google. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her contributions to wearable haptics.
Hong received her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After two years as a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, she joined the faculty in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 1998. She holds concurrent courtesy appointments in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University.
Eric is a haptics enthusiast breaking the barriers for haptics to scale.
Eric designed the haptics architecture of Interhaptics, lead a team of engineers and marketing colleagues to the launch of the Haptics Composer: the first multiplatform Haptics Design tool on the market.
He co-founded Go Touch VR exploring skin indentation technologies for haptics applications in VR. Go Touch VR raised 2 m $ to create new technologies for XR.
Eric was the CTO of Hap2u in charge of the software team designing the rendering stack to drive surface haptics technologies at full capabilities. Hap2U raised 6 m $ from Daimler and it is going to revolution mobile haptics as we know it.
He published 20 + scientific papers on haptics and human-machine interactions and deposed 5 patents on haptics technologies and applications.
Since 2007, Stella has been working as a development engineer at BMW, with a focus on haptics and future interior concepts.
J. Edward Colgate received a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering in 1988 from M.I.T. He subsequently joined Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he is currently the Allen and Johnnie Breed University Design Professor and a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Colgate's principal research interests are haptic interfaces and human-robot interaction. He and collaborator Michael Peshkin are the inventors of a class of collaborative robots known as “cobots” and a suite of technologies for bringing programmable haptic feedback to touch screens. Dr. Colgate was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame. Dr. Colgate was one of the founding co-directors of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University where he directed the Master of Science in Engineering Design and Innovation, which combines graduate-level engineering courses with a broad exposure to human-centered design. In addition to his academic pursuits, Dr. Colgate has founded three startup companies the most recent of which, Tanvas Inc., is commercializing innovative surface haptics technologies.
