Haptics
Touch, force feedback, and tactile interaction
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.
Key Questions
How do people perceive softness, stiffness, texture, weight, force, and contact through active touch?
Which tactile cues can be rendered or augmented without breaking the feeling of a natural interaction?
How do visual, proprioceptive, and haptic signals combine when they disagree or arrive late?
How can psychophysics guide useful wearable, vibrotactile, and XR haptic feedback?
Related Keywords
Portfolio and Resources
Aging Touch website
Public research resource on tactile perception, ageing, and surface texture perception, linked to BBSRC-supported work.
Oculus Connect haptic demo
Interactive haptic demonstration translating perceptual research into an industry-facing XR experience.
Tactile iPhone experiment
Mobile tactile perception experiment translating multisensory texture research into an accessible public app.
TactileMirror code
Code for a wearable sensory substitution device, supporting reproducible haptics and tactile augmentation research.
Simulation of a virtual stiffness
Archived demonstration of virtual stiffness and visual-haptic interaction.
Ultrasound/visual virtual viscosity
Archived demo exploring perceived viscosity through combined ultrasound and visual stimulation.Featured Publications
(2026).
Belt and Whistles: Adding Lower Body Collision Awareness for MR Experiences.
CHI ‘26: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery.
(2023).
Skin properties and afferent density in the deterioration of tactile spatial acuity with age.
The Journal of Physiology, 601(3), 517-533.
Articles in haptics 37
(2026).
Belt and Whistles: Adding Lower Body Collision Awareness for MR Experiences.
CHI ‘26: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery.
(2023).
Skin properties and afferent density in the deterioration of tactile spatial acuity with age.
The Journal of Physiology, 601(3), 517-533.
(2022).
Skin and mechanoreceptor contribution to tactile input for perception: a review of simulation models.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
(2022).
Perceived intensities of normal and shear skin stimuli using a wearable haptic bracelet.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
(2021).
Tactile Echoes: Multisensory Augmented Reality for the Hand.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
(2020).
Contact forces in roughness discrimination.
Scientific Reports.
(2020).
The Predictive Perception of Dynamic Vibrotactile Stimuli Applied to the Fingertip.
2020 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS).
(2020).
Static weight perception through skin stretch and kinesthetic information: detection thresholds, JNDs, and PSEs.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
(2019).
Haptic Sketches on the Arm for manipulation in virtual reality.
arXiv.
(2019).
Exogenous cueing of visual attention using small, directional, tactile cues applied to the fingertip.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2019).
Perceptual Limits of Visual-Haptic Simultaneity in Virtual Reality Interactions.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC).
(2019).
Tactile Echoes: A Wearable System for Tactile Augmentation of Objects.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2019).
The contributions of skin stretch and kinesthetic information to static weight perception.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2019).
The frequency of tactile adaptation systematically biases subsequent frequency identification.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2018).
Touch with foreign hands: The effect of virtual hand appearance on visual-haptic integration.
Proceedings - SAP 2018: ACM Symposium on Applied Perception.
(2018).
An Experimental Setup to Test Dual-Joystick Directional Responses to Vibrotactile Stimuli.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
(2018).
Experimental Evaluation of Vibrotactile Training Mappings for Dual-Joystick Directional Guidance.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
(2017).
An experimental setup to test dual-joystick directional responses to vibrotactile stimuli.
2017 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC).
(2016).
Look but don't touch: Visual cues to surface structure drive somatosensory cortex.
NeuroImage.
(2015).
Speed/accuracy tradeoff in force perception.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
(2014).
Computational aspects of softness perception.
Multisensory softness.
(2014).
Multisensory Softness.
Springer London.
(2014).
Perceived Softness of Composite Objects.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
(2014).
Response time-dependent force perception during hand movement.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
(2011).
Effects of visual-haptic asynchronies and loading-unloading movements on compliance perception.
Brain Research Bulletin.
(2011).
Perceived compliance in a pinch.
Vision Research.
(2011).
The rubber hand illusion: Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift Do not go hand in hand.
PLoS ONE.
(2010).
Combination and integration in the perception of visual-haptic compliance information.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
(2010).
User-based evaluation of data-driven haptic rendering.
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception.
(2010).
Within- and cross-modal distance information disambiguate visual size-change perception.
PLoS Computational Biology.
(2009).
Computationally efficient techniques for data-driven haptic rendering.
Proceedings - 3rd Joint EuroHaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, World Haptics 2009.
(2009).
Influence of visual and haptic delays on stiffness perception in augmented reality.
Science and Technology Proceedings - IEEE 2009 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ISMAR 2009.
Related Research Areas
Multisensory Perception
How the brain combines uncertain signals during perception and action
Extended Reality
Immersive systems grounded in perceptual science
Psychophysics
Measuring perception, action, and user experience
Computational Modelling
Formal models of perception, timing, movement, and interaction
Massimiliano Di Luca
Associate Professor in Psychology and Computer Science
Associate Professor in Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, leading interdisciplinary research in multisensory perception, extended reality, haptics, and computational cognitive science.