Concerns about touching surfaces and objects in public spaces have increased due to the pandemic, and companies are looking for alternative solutions that can support equally effective interactions. Further, as physical and digital worlds merge in new applications such as automotive heads-up displays or untethered augmented reality smart glasses, users are looking for natural and meaningful ways to interact with 3D content.
Ultraleap’s hand tracking and mid-air haptics technologies are at the heart of a new virtual approach. These technologies enable human connection, creativity, and collaboration through touchless interfaces that are safe, clean, and intuitive. This session will focus on the technologies and solutions that companies are using to drive brand awareness, enable safer interactions, create connection for
Alex Driskill-Smith | President, North America, Ultraleap

• Where are we now?
• How did we get here?
• Latest Developments
• Where is the ecosystem going?
• How does it compare to other technologies?

Tim Szeto | CEO and Founder, Nanoport Technology Inc.

With the increased adoption of haptics technology in consumer devices comes market fragmentation. Different proprietary APIs, proprietary coding and file formats, different hardware-to-software interfaces, and different motor characteristics effectively create “walled gardens” that are making it difficult for application developers to incorporate haptics easily into their applications.
This is where standardization could really help. Standardized coding formats and APIs, standardized evaluation criteria for haptics, standardized vibration motor performance ranges, to name a few, can only help harmonize the haptics offerings from different vendors – without compromising vendor differentiation. This, in turn, will incentivize content and application creators to incorporate richer haptics experiences into their offerings, leveraging the standard interfaces throughout the stack. Current walled gardens will give way to a flourishing haptics ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders.
In this talk, I will be describing the progress of haptics standardization activities in international standards development organizations (SDOs) like MPEG, ATSC, and IETF. Highlights include treating haptics as a first-order media type in ISOBMFF files, incorporating haptics into ATSC 3.0 broadcasts, and a recently issued draft Call for Proposals on a standardized haptic coding format by MPEG. I will also look ahead on the other potential areas where standardization could make sense.
 
Yeshwant Muthusamy Ph.D., | Senior Director, Standards, Immersion

MODERATOR:
Dave Birnbaum – Distinguished Staff, Technology Strategy, Immersion Corporation

SPEAKERS:

• Gwydion ap Dafydd – CTO, Lofelt
• Philippe Guillotel – Distinguished Scientist, InterDigital
• Yeshwant Muthusamy, Ph.D. – Senior Director, Standards, Immersion Corporation

Embr Labs is the first thermal wellness technology company, combining thermal haptics, digital experiences, and human psychophysiology to deliver transformative tools for health and wellness. Our first product, Embr Wave, is an intelligent warming and cooling bracelet that integrates with a mobile app to deliver digital + thermal wellness solutions. Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Matthew Smith, will discuss the science behind thermal haptics, the markets driving adoption of their first generation product, and give examples from the lab and the real world to illustrate how thermal haptics can improve the human experience.
 
Matthew J. Smith Ph.D, | Chief Scientific Officer, Embr Labs

Sateco industrializes a silicone stack actuator which moves without noise and produces a significant proportional displacement and mechanical force. This so-called artificial muscle has a wide bandwidth as it can move very slowly (<1 Hz) up to a few 100 Hz. The fast motion can be used to create a tactile stimulus. The slow motion can induce a change in surface texture, providing additional tactile and visual cues to the user for orientation. We show examples of efficient integration of the actuator into hard and soft surfaces. The actuator is compliant to curved surfaces, compensates tolerances, and attenuates vibration. The low weight and compact shape make it suitable for wearable devices.
 
Daniel Haefliger, PhD | CEO, Sateco XT AG

Author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing.

Attempts to transform touch into a sense capable of being captured, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed by computers reach back to the 1960s. Such efforts have been intended explicitly to make touch like the senses of seeing and hearing, by providing touch with its own distinct set of mediation technologies and techniques. This process of analogous mediation, according to haptics proponents, would eventually help restore balance to the mediated sensorium, giving touch back its vital powers as an epistemological and emotional agent.

Thus far, however, attempts to design technologies that could meet this lofty goal of mediating touch have generally fallen short. The moment of sudden and extreme physical distancing forced on us in response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the lack of pragmatic and commercially viable solutions offered by the haptics industry—solutions that might have helped ameliorate the negative psychological effects of distanced communication during the pandemic.

Prompted by this crisis, I outline a set of practical obstacles to the widespread adoption of haptic technologies, including the materiality of the human tactile system, the accuracy of the various actuators responsible for generating haptic sensations, network latency issues, lack of standardization in haptic languages and design tools, the compatibility of haptic data with data encoded for the senses of seeing and hearing, and a more general cultural fatigue resulting from decades of unfulfilled promises made around touch technology by haptics evangelists.

David Parisi, Ph.D | Associate Professor of Emerging Media, College of Charleston

The sense of touch, which is essential for human dexterity, is virtually absent from today's robotic hands. Just as anyone who has ever had their hands numbed from the cold already knows, human hands that cannot feel are slow, clumsy, and fairly ineffective – we should expect no more from telerobotic systems that lack the sense of touch. In this work, we have combined anthropomorphic robotic hands, human-like tactile sensing, and high-fidelity haptic gloves to create a new generation of tactile telerobots that allow an operator to control and feel a pair of robotic hands with unprecedented realism. This creates new opportunities for high-fidelity remote manipulation in applications where distance, safety, or accessibility are a challenge.

 
Jeremy Fishel, Ph.D. | Founder, Tangible Research