Haptic perception

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in haptic perception fueled in part by the lack of fundamental knowledge that is necessary for the further development of haptic interfaces. In this chapter, a number of common methodologies for haptic psychophysical experiments are presented, such as discrimination and matching experiments and magnitude estimation. This is followed by a discussion of current research on the haptic perception of objects. In haptic object perception, shape, curvature, volume, weight, texture and material properties are important aspects that are considered. In this chapter, it will also be shown that the haptic perception of spatial relations is far from veridical, and that, like in vision, some haptic features "pop-out". Finally, some examples of how this research is being applied to technologies are discussed.