(Terminology note: Most English speakers will probably call this field "tactile displays". Technically 'tactile' is only part of the sense of touch, than from the sensory nerves at the surface of the body. There is also the sense of the position of the joints of the body and tension in the muscles & tendons, which is called 'proprioceptive' or 'kinaesthetic'/'kinesthetic'. 'Haptic' covers both.)
For years, on-&-off and part-time along with other projects, I researched computer haptic displays for BT (British Telecommunications plc.) as an aid for blind people, to work out what would fundamentally & minimally would needed to be replicated by such a display (like how a visual display can get away with just red+green+blue light) and what the network requirements would be. It was also good publicity, of course, in being new, interesting and socially useful.
Many of the studies were done in collaboration with the University of Hertfordshire's Sensory Disabilities Research Unit (SDRU) in their Psychology Department. With us at BT providing equipment, inventing haptic simulation algorithms & creating the bespoke software and students at the SDRU trialling them on blind & sighted people. It was a productive collaboration.
The following are some publications from those projects. They are not intended to be comprehensive CV bibliography for me nor do they include those from
At present there is only one! And even that is only as PDF and MS Word 2k files, not blind-accessibly ALT-texted HTML. I made HTML versions but they were made so long ago (the website they were on is long gone) and they used now-obsolete methods for accessibility text (D-links & LONGDESC attribute links). The conversions probably also need proofreading again. So this page collection is a work in progress. But I've started with the one which covered the most as it is the summary of several studies that I wrote up as an MSc thesis.
My recommendation for reading on my contribution to the subject, and for the subject background. Unlike the papers on one study each & constrained by academic publishing format, I wrote this more like a book; and made colourful illustrations. It covers hardware available, simulation algorithms introduction, psychology introduction, simulation of textures & shapes, some of the studies the SDRU ran, haptic illusions we found, key findings and the invention of haptic gamma correction. It even includes a preview (eventually not published elsewhere) of our findings for haptic networking (which soon after lead to us being the first to transmit 3d haptics live person-to-person internationally over the Internet).
It is my MSc thesis (which, in my unconventional way of doing things, was 5 years after my PhD one!).
Formats available: