Haptic interaction becomes reality

Haptic interaction has for a long time been a promise that has not fully been realized in everyday technology due to several reasons. Already for more than 20 years the research community in the field of human-technology interaction has identified multimodal interaction as a potential next mainstream interaction paradigm to replace graphical user interfaces. At the same time, both personal computers and mobile devices have developed rapidly allowing more computing power, more sophisticated feedback through different channels such as display and audio, and more ways of interaction to be used in everyday computing tasks. Within the past few years, haptic interaction has been under rapid research and development. In this article, we will give an introduction to the present state of the art in haptic interaction technology and its promises in mainstream information and communication technology.