Haptography: Capturing and Recreating the Rich Feel of Real Surfaces

Haptic interfaces, which allow a user to touch virtual and remote environments through a hand-held tool, have opened up exciting new possibilities for applications such as computer-aided design and robot-assisted surgery. Unfortunately, the haptic renderings produced by these systems seldom feel like authentic re-creations of the richly varied surfaces one encounters in the real world. We have thus envisioned the new approach of haptography, or haptic photography, in which an individual quickly records a physical interaction with a real surface and then recreates that experience for a user at a different time and/or place. This paper presents an overview of the goals and methods of haptography, emphasizing the importance of accurately capturing and recreating the high frequency accelerations that occur during tool-mediated interactions. In the capturing domain, we introduce a new texture modeling and synthesis method based on linear prediction applied to acceleration signals recorded from real tool interactions. For recreating, we show a new haptography handle prototype that enables the user of a Phantom Omni to feel fine surface features and textures

Spatial updating in narratives.

Across two experiments we investigated spatial updating in environments encoded through narratives. In Experiment 1, in which participants were given visualization instructions to imagine the protagonist’s movement, they formed an initial representation during learning but did not update it during subsequent described movement. In Experiment 2, in which participants were instructed to physically move in space towards the directions of the described objects prior to testing, there was evidence for spatial updating. Overall, findings indicate that physical movement can cause participants to link a spatial representation of a remote environment to a sensorimotor framework and update the locations of remote objects while they move

Reenacting sensorimotor features of drawing movements from friction sounds

International audienceEven though we generally don't pay attention to the friction sounds produced when we are writing or drawing, these sounds are recordable, and can even evoke the underlying gesture. In this paper, auditory perception of such sounds, and the internal representations they evoke when we listen to them, is considered from the sensorimotor learning point of view. The use of synthesis processes of friction sounds makes it possible to investigate the perceptual influence of each gestures parameter separately. Here, the influence of the velocity profile on the mental representation of the gesture induced by a friction sound was investigated through 3 experiments. The results reveal the perceptual relevance of this parameter, and particularly a specific morphology corresponding to biological movements, the so-called 1/3-power law. The experiments are discussed according to the sensorimotor theory and the invariant taxonomy of the ecological approach

Assessing the Impact of Automatic vs. Controlled Rotations on Spatial Transfer with a Joystick and a Walking Interface in VR

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceWe present a user study assessing spatial transfer in a 3D navigation task, with two different motor activities: a minimal (joystick) and an extensive motor activity (walking Interface), with rotations of the viewpoint either controlled by the user, or automatically managed by the system. The task consisted in learning a virtual path of a 3D model of a real city, with either one of these four conditions: Joystick / Treadmill Vs Manual Rotation / Automatic Rotation. We assessed spatial knowledge with six spatial restitution tasks. To assess the interfaces used, we analyzed also the interaction data acquired during the learning path. Our results show that the direct control of rotations has different effects, depending on the motor activity required by the input modality. The quality of spatial representation increases with the Treadmill when rotations are enabled. With the Joystick, controlling the rotations affect spatial representations. We discuss our findings in terms of cognitive, sensorimotor processes and human computer interaction issues

Why has research in face recognition progressed so slowly? The importance of variability

Despite many years of research, there has been surprisingly little progress in our understanding of how faces are identified. Here I argue that there are two contributory factors: (a) Our methods have obscured a critical aspect of the problem, within-person variability; and (b) research has tended to conflate familiar and unfamiliar face processing. Examples of procedures for studying variability are given, and a case is made for studying real faces, of the type people recognize every day. I argue that face recognition (specifically identification) may only be understood by adopting new techniques that acknowledge statistical patterns in the visual environment. As a consequence, some of our current methods will need to be abandoned

Perceiving Surface Roughness via a Rigid Probe: Effects of Exploration Speed and Mode of Touch

Two experiments investigated the psychophysical consequences for roughness perception of altering the speed of motion with which textured surfaces are explored using a rigid probe. Two speed ranges were used: a 10-fold change (Experiment 1) and a 4-fold change (Experiment 2). Relative motion was altered both by moving the probe actively over a stationary surface (active mode) and by moving the surfaces under the stationary probe (passive mode). Substantial effects of speed were obtained. The results are examined both in terms of the complex effects of speed on the attributes of the psychophysical roughness functions and in terms of the systematic change in the magnitude of the speed effect contingent on the size of the speed range. We also consider how best to minimize any potentially harmful effects of speed on haptic exploration of simulated textures using haptic interfaces. Two operator training procedures are proposed to achieve effective haptic exploration strategies