Touching the Future: HAVE Challenges and Trends

Abstract

Many researchers insist that the field of haptics is still in its infancy. Most of the challenges discussed in the next sections are hot research topics in this field, and some of them are currently being studied. Advances on each of these described fronts are certainly to be expected in the near future. As the prices of haptic devices drop, gaming industries will be the first ones to take notice and exploit the technology to complement their playing consoles, thereby creating a significant advantage over their competitors. Home rehabilitation applications will most certainly follow. Governments are desperate to reduce healthcare costs, so development of practical applications of this sort would be encouraged and funded. In addition, haptic technology will undoubtedly gain an important place in the education sector. New educational approaches rely on visual and auditory demonstrations to describe unintuitive concepts to students; the incorporation of the sense of touch is simply a natural progression of this trend to newer media. The field of networked haptics will be the last to see any considerable advances. This is mainly due to the fact that it relies heavily on the state of the network. Haptic applications have stringent QoS requirements that most nondedicated networks cannot guarantee. Until these network infrastructures are upgraded, networked haptic applications will continue to struggle from the lack of QoS guarantees. Last but not least, increased computing power will allow for the implementation of complex, multi-point, physics-based haptic rendering algorithms to support more natural interactions with a virtual or remote world.