Multimodal haptic with touch devices

ended

MULTITOUCH aims at providing high level training to a new generation of Early Stage Researchers (ESR) in the multidisciplinary field of haptics. We will create an ambitious environment that free their creativity, motivate them for entrepreneurship, and drive them towards thriving careers. We will achieve this by combining hands-on training, involving academic and industrial researchers, bringing the necessary academic knowledge as well as soft-skills, and by facing off research challenges in different sectors of neuroscience, computer science, rehabilitation, human-computer interfaces, multisensory tactile displays and virtual reality. The ambition of MULTITOUCH is to train a cohort of scientific researchers that can work in the R&D department of companies of the digital economy, and that have the skills and will to create devices and applications accessible to everyone. For that purpose, MULTITOUCH develops an approach that intentionally blurs the boundary between assistive and mainstream technologies, and which is supported by the non-academic partner organizations involved in the project. MULTITOUCH will explore how tactile feedback can be integrated with auditory and visual feedback in next-generation multisensory human-computer interfaces (HCI) combining tactile, auditory and visual feedback, such as multisensory tactile displays (TD) and multisensory virtual reality (VR) setups, with the aim of producing an enriched user experience. During the project, the ESRs will improve current knowledge on how touch integrates with the other senses in conditions of active touch, i.e. when tactile input is generated by active contact with the environment (e.g. tactile exploration of the surface of a display, tactile exploration of VR environments). Tools used for introducing more multimodal haptic feedback into HCI will be developed in the project, and made accessible to the scientific community.