Haptic Technologies

Technologies of touch and the human-computer interface (HCI)

VTi's CyberGrasp™ glove (above) with exoskeleton for added force feedback as well as vibrotactile stimulation

Embarking on an archaeology of the technologies of touch, in an article for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Paterson 2006) I have examined the history of haptic devices from telerobotics to the PHANToM™ desktop interface [Personal HAptic iNTerface Mechanism], and discuss tactile bodysuits and gloves, resulting in a narrative of the genesis of ‘presence’ and ‘immersion’ through various haptic technologies.

Furthermore, in a forthcoming article for Space and Culture (Paterson, forthcoming) I explore ideas of robot skin and the human-robot interface, and pursue various ideas of so-called 'social presence'.

Looking at the role of technology in touch, where the synaesthetic basis of everyday perception is mediated through the use of interfaces and technological prostheses. For the idea of touch in technology is one that seems at last to be coming of age. Haptics, or the technologies of touch, is “one of the growth areas in human computer interaction or new types of sensory interaction with computers” (Steve Furner of BT, interview 8/9/00). While the concept of multimedia has been trumpeted for years, usually that has equated only with vision and sound. With smell devices in prototype form at MIT, it is haptics that is emerging as the next aspect of multimedia (Kramer in Hodges 1998; Furner 8/9/00). Haptics is, according to Salisbury (1995) “the newest technology to arrive in the world of computer interface devices.”

After many years of over-emphasis on the visual elements of computing for example, in PCs and videogame consoles, the other senses are beginning to become important. As processor speed and memory size increases dramatically in PCs especially, the “gap between capability and usability” of the computer is vast, in the words of Massie, co-inventor of the PHANToM haptic interface (in Mahoney 2000). Haptic technologies are making an appearance in high-end workstations for computer-aided design (CAD) as well as at the lower end, on home PCs and consoles, to augment the human-computer interface (HCI). Effectively this means adding a “new mechanical channel,” or a further strand, to human-computer communication so that data can be accessed and literally manipulated not just through visual means (Hayward in Hodges 1998). Whereas the keyboard is a passive mechanical channel between the computer and user, haptics enables a more active exploration, is programmable according to the type of data or object to be manipulated, and allows the user not just to see three dimensional shapes on the screen visually but also to feel them and mould them through the haptic interface.

The Logitech iFeel™ mouse (above)

Echoing Gibson's (1968) distinction between passive and active touch, co-inventor of the PHANToM Kenneth Salisbury observes: “Unlike our other sensory modalities, haptics relies on action to stimulate perception… to sense the shape of a cup we do not take a simple tactile snapshot and go away and think about what we felt. Rather, we grasp and manipulate the object, running our fingers across its shape and surfaces in order to build a mental image of a cup” (in Hodges 1998). This is as true in the virtual world as in the real world, and so to get a true sense of touch in a virtual world through a haptic interface, the manipulation of the object must occur over time, in a synthetic world still with spatial and sensory continuity, so that tactile memory flows over time to build up a complex dynamic haptic image of the object under examination. This is easiest when the haptic is collocated with the visual and the auditory, so that interactions confirm each other for the user.

The SensAble PHANToM haptic device at BT Labs with the ‘thimble-gimbal’ (above)

This convergence is one that enables an augmentation for the user of the interface not just in the purely tactile realm but as a set of augmentations that begins to play with an emerging multisensory realm, one that talks often of ‘immersion’. This story is not therefore a straightforward history of tactile technologies, but an ‘archaeology’ (pace Foucault, especially 1994) of how the concept of multisensory immersion becomes an issue and begins to become explicitly articulated in the language.

It is some measure of the recent importance of haptic technologies that they are being incorporated into the hardware and software architectures of videogame consoles, perhaps the cheapest and most accessible forms of technological immersion currently available.

Foucault M (1994) The Order Of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences (Vintage: New York)

Hodges M (1998) 'It Just Feels Right' in Computer Graphics World, Vol. 21, No. 10

Mahoney D P (2000) 'Innovative interfaces' in Computer Graphics World, Vol. 23, No. 2

Paterson, M. (2006) 'Feel the Presence: The Technologies of Touch', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(5), pp. 691-708

Paterson, M. (In Preparation) 'Electric snakes and mechanical ladders? Social presence, domestic spaces, and human-robot interactions', Space and Culture

Salisbury K (1995) 'Haptics: The Technology of Touch' at http://www.sensable.com/haptics/haptwhpp.htm

'How the world touches us'

Aesthetics and the tactile encounter with art, the 'haptic' and the 'optic'

i. 'How the world touches us' - the history of art, the 'haptic' and the 'optic'
ii. A haptic digital aesthetic - tangible play, prosthetic performance

Explored in chapter 6 of The Senses of Touch...

A haptic digital aesthetics

Tangible play, prosthetic performance

[Above] Stahl Stenlie's Inter_Skin project

Touch and digital performance. This examines the expressive possibility of digital media performances that involve technologies of touch. This analysis includes examples of artworks divided into three separate 'moments' - the 'skin' and the discourse of surface; the 'flesh' and the notion of technological extension and prosthesis; and the 'body' and its motility, the way interactive touch is performed both on stage and online.

In digital performance some interesting developments have occurred whereby the body becomes displaced, and the senses distorted. This refashioning of the body in digital space has implications for theories of embodiment and of body morphology. Some digital performances positively engage in Luce Irigaray's (1993) discourse of fluidity in its evocation of the virtual environment, even the way the body navigates and moves around the virtual world, not by mastering space but by being penetrated by it.

Examples in performance art of the skin and the play of surfaces, the flesh and the concept of vascularity, and the body are shown to be three 'moments' in the enfolding and interleavings of the one into the other, providing convenient points of analysis in what is a physiological and conceptual continuum. The haptic, the touch sense, underlies these physiological moments, and go towards re-affirming digital embodiment. Tactility is seen as an underlying theme in these cases, as opposed to the mostly masculinist emphasis on sight, and is prioritised by Irigaray. Touch brings us back into the world.

So this analysis of the digital body looks thematically at three types of performance, those of skin, flesh, and body. In using surgical technology, skin modification takes place as performance art for Orlan; prostheses and digital feedback in Stelarc play with ideas of flesh; and for Char Davies the synaesthetic links between vision, touch and space occur through the body, whose boundaries can be reconfigured and re-engineered in digital space to expand the sensorium.

See 'Links' page for more haptic aesthetics and performance material.

One way of gauging the way that we are touched and affected by tactile properties of objects in space is through aesthetics [from Greek aesthesis, pertaining to the senses]. The aesthetic encounter with sculpture for example is a way of informing our visual sense with other senses, including the tactile, and the way that the senses are combined in our phenomenological perception of the world. Aesthetic contemplation of a sculpture is illustrative therefore of our everyday, embodied tactile-spatial experience.

The means by which this analysis can take place is through an examination of sculpture and architecture, in fact the set of forms between these plastic arts that form and shape space. These cause us to experience a set of embodied perceptions that highlight the unitary basis of the sensations, and particularly of touch and space. The body is central in perception for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and they dwell on the constitution of objects, or more explicitly 'things', as arising from the body's interaction with the world. For Heidegger especially, what makes the 'thingness' of things is important, and this can come forward to us through concrete or stonelike examples such as sculpture. But a more explicit analysis of touch and space needs to depart from the body per se and the thingness of things, to see how the senses interact in our everyday, embodied experience of space.

While aesthetic theory is involved in this consideration, chiefly Merleau-Ponty's (1964) reading of Cézanne's ability to evoke tactility through the visual medium of painting, this chapter is not primarily on the aesthetics of sculpture or architecture, although the aesthetic encounter heightens our appreciation of touch and texture and mass, those qualities which inform our visual perception. Instead, I want to examine in a series of phenomenological snapshots of the encounter with objects in space what the prerequisites are for the ability to synthesise touch and space. Moving on from the rather abstracted or extraordinary aesthetic encounter with a sculptural object, which engages in the debate in aesthetics of 'touch-space,' what can be gleaned from this will be applied to more quotidian encounters. The argument will therefore be extended into the objects that are crafted, that are the work of the hands; and in these, like sculpture, the reciprocality of crafted and crafter, of toucher and touched, will be investigated in order to pursue the links between touch-space and visual space through the mediation of objects. These encounters do not involve solely the senses of sight and touch but also, in the approach and the navigation around such objects or shaped spaces, the haptic senses generally, thereby including tactile-muscular, proprioceptive and vestibular senses in the everyday encounter with things.

The examination then considers the way that perception and body memory are involved in a set of sensory investments in space that unfold from the body. This is partly accomplished through Gibson's ideas of 'affordances' and Deleuze's concept of 'affect', tying together the body, the perceptions of mass, shape, colour, and the texture of the world, with body memory. Thus the discussion will take a more neuropsychological turn, away from the incarnated phenomenology of early Merleau-Ponty, and equally away from the metaphysical concepts of the flesh of the later Merleau-Ponty (1968). What I hope to achieve is something that accommodates the complexity of sensuous experience that lies in the interaction of bodies and things not only in the immediacy of the physical encounter, but the layerings and unfoldings of sensory phenomena that come from body memory into the world as we perceive it. It is in the interactions of the past, of both being touched and touching, that allow us to project forward, to make investments in perceived spatiality, in the present. What Henri Bergson, via philosopher Deleuze (1991), would term the collapse from 'virtuality' into 'actuality.'

From the position that our vision is informed by other senses and body memory, then, to the position that our everyday interaction with objects relies on a set of sensory investments in objects in space, is the purpose of this chapter. Taking this position, however, supports a wider definition of 'haptic' in the way that Iris Marion Young (1990) sees it, as "an orientation to sensuality as such." So by examining spaces as being invested with a complex assemblage of sensory information and body memories, the everyday experience of objects in space will be shown to take place in what unfolds from the body, a space of sensuality as such, what I will term 'haptic space.'

Deleuze, G. (1991) Bergsonism (Athlone: London)

Gibson, J. J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception (London, Houghton Mifflin)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Tr. C Dallery, Ed. J M Edie (Evanston Il, Northwestern University Press)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Tr. A Lingis, Ed. C Leforte (Evanston, Northwestern University Press)

Young, I.M. (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)