Haptics

Haptics is the part of the research programme concerned with touch as an active, informative, and designable signal. The work asks how people perceive texture, softness, weight, force, vibration, and contact, and how those perceptual mechanisms can be used to build haptic systems that feel useful rather than merely mechanically accurate.

A central theme is that touch is not a single measurement channel. Softness, for example, depends on forces, finger position, vision, proprioception, timing, and the movement used to explore an object. The same physical object can feel different when information arrives late, when visual and haptic signals disagree, or when different fingers contribute different evidence during a grasp.

This topic also includes applied haptic rendering and wearable feedback: vibrotactile guidance, skin stretch, tactile augmentation, wrist and hand devices, virtual stiffness, and haptic feedback for XR and mixed reality. Across these projects, psychophysical measurement is used to identify what people can reliably detect and discriminate, while modelling and system design translate those findings into interactive devices, demonstrations, and public resources.