The Potential of Haptics Technologies

TLDR

Haptics integration into virtual environments remains nascent, hindered by hardware, cost, and realism limitations, yet decreasing costs and expanding applications suggest a forthcoming revolution. The authors anticipate that haptics will become a groundbreaking media in the future.

Abstract

In spite of the significant recent progress, the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy due to limitations in the hardware, the cost of development, as well as the level of reality they provide. Nonetheless, we believe that the field will one day be one of the groundbreaking media of the future. It has its current holdups but the promise of the future is worth the wait. The technology is becoming cheaper and applications are becoming more forthcoming and apparent. If we can survive this infancy, it will promise to be an amazing revolution in the way we interact with computers and the virtual world. The researchers organize the rapidly increasing multidisciplinary research of haptics into four subareas: human haptics, machine haptics, computer haptics, and multimedia haptics