Haptics: Touching Beyond Audio and Video

Having evolved over approximately 20 years, Multimedia can now be considered a mature field. The term media traditionally refers to entities such as audio, video, text, images, graphics, sound, and animation. Today, while the range of these media and their applications are vast, all of them correspond in one way or another to only two main human perceptions: hearing and vision. As such, even though we are seeing more and more advanced multimedia applications and tools in both research and in practice, they are limited to the human senses of hearing and vision. To truly exploit Multimedia, other human senses must be added. These include the sense of touch, taste, and smell. While some limited research has been performed about taste and smell, the more significant sense of touch has started to emerge in both research and practical arenas at a fast pace. This is referred to as haptics: the new media that deals with the human sense of touch.