The Haptic Museum

Our IMSC team has used haptics to allow museum visitors to explore three-dimensional works of art by “touching” them, something that is not possible in ordinary museums due to prevailing “hands-off” policies [1, 2]. Haptics involves the modality of touch--the sensation of shape and texture an observer feels when exploring a virtual object, such as a three-dimensional model of a piece of pottery or art glass[3, 4, 5]. The haptic devices used in our research are the Phantom [6] and the CyberGrasp [7]. The Phantom is a desktop device that provides force feedback to the user's fingertip. The image on the left, below, shows a researcher at IMSC exploring the surface of a virtual teapot from USC’s Fisher Gallery using a Phantom. The image on the right shows the researcher calibrating the CyberGrasp, a whole-hand force-feedback glove that can be used to grasp virtual objects. A network of “tendons” transmits grasp forces back to the user’s fingers and palm. Both of these devices can be used by a remote museum visitor retrieving the model of the art object over the Internet or other network. Our mission is to develop seamless, device-independent haptic collaboration such that a museum staff member and a museum-goer or art student at a remote location can jointly examine a vase or bronze figure, note its interesting contours and textures, and consider such questions as "Why did the artist make this side rough but that side smooth?" or "What is this indentation on the bottom for?"