An Inexpensive Tactile Infrastructure for Robotics,graphics, and Imaging

1 James Wolfer, Computer Science, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, IN U.S.A., [email protected] Abstract  Tactile interaction forms an important part of human experience. From the exploration of material textures to life-saving feedback such as breast selfexamination, we obtain a tactile picture of our world on a daily basis. Unfortunately, exposing students to touchenabled computing has typically been too expensive for classroom use. Recently, however, a variety of inexpensive tactile feedback devices have become available to support computer games. This paper describes the adaptation of one such device, a commercial, haptically-enabled mouse, the customization of a supporting Linux device driver, and the development of Python-based, touch-enabled, imaging. The resulting infrastructure allows users to "virtually touch" images, or specific aspects of the images. Specific examples include touch-enabled exploration of the Mona Lisa, haptic feedback from digital mammograms, and the "touchtraversal" of a simulated robot maze. Collectively, this hardware/software combination provides an inexpensive introduction to tactile feedback for robotics, graphics, and human interaction.