Preface

Society is becoming based on information gathering, manipulation, and dissemination. We are witnessing an ever-growing and evolving content delivery market accompanied by significant restructuring worldwide. Such continuous changes reflect the need for specialization of new content, dynamic access to content to enable timely reaction, flexible delivery, customized presentation structures, interactivity and collaboration. These changes are caused and enabled by the transformation in the delivery mode from paper to electronic media formats and the growing trends towards interactive services delivering information in full accordance with the declared interests of the end-user. Haptics, a term that was derived from the Greek verb "haptesthai", meaning "to touch", refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. This word was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by researchers in the field of experimental psychology to refer to the active touch of real objects by humans. In the late nineteen eighties, the term was redefined to enlarge its scope and to include all aspects of machine touch and humanmachine touch interaction. The 'touching' of objects can be by humans, machines, or a combination of both; the environment can be real, virtual, or a combination of both. Currently, the term has brought together many disciplines including biomechanics, psychology, neurophysiology, engineering and computer science to refer to the study of human touch and force feedback with the external environment.

It is worth mentioning that even with the significant progress in haptic technologies, the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the new society's human activities including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce and science would forever change if we learned how to capture, manipulate and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move forward, many commercial and technological barriers need to be be overcome. First, business models/frameworks are needed to make haptic devices practical, inexpensive and widely accessible; ultimately, a haptic device should be as easily pluggable as the mouse in a computer. Moreover, multipoint, multihand and multiperson interaction scenarios need further investigations to reach enticingly rich interactivity. Finally, we should not forget that touch and physical interaction are fundamental in haptic systems development. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information

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that might reflect a desire to speak a physically-based language that has never been explored before.

Traditionally, the most typical style of human-computer interaction has been the visual style, which means people mainly interact with computers via texts, data, and images on the screen. There has only been indirect manipulation between human and computers. Keyboards and mouses have been used to translate human body languages and project these movements into actions on the screen. Using such indirect manipulation input devices, human don't receive any force feedback about these actions. Haptics technology, on the other hand, provides a new style of interaction and facilitates the perception of objects through the sense of touch.

The complexity of haptics applications is usually the very first obstacle for both developers and users. Haptics technology requires highly specialized hardware and software. This equipment is expensive for single daily users to obtain, not to mention the prototypes of these devices which are usually too large and not easily portable. Moreover, to complete a haptics project, experts from many different disciplines need to co-operate. To sum up, haptics technology nowadays is still in its early stage, there are still many problems waiting to be solved and obstacles to be surmounted.

Without question, haptics technology is a revolution in the way in which we interact in the virtual world. Haptics prototypes will continue to be refined and there will be further research into the human-computer interface. User patterns and preferences will also be further investigated. Meanwhile, researchers and developers will continue to improve the accuracy of capturing human movements and providing the proper force feedback.

Experts are also working on producing portable and consumer-grade haptic devices. Hopefully, with the arrival of these consumer-grade haptic devices on the markets, researchers will be able to obtain more real-time information, as well as feedback from customers and they can then further improve the haptic technology. With related technology improving every day, more and more pieces of research on haptics topics are being published. I believe there is a promising future for haptics technology.

*Dedication For my wife Ligia and my beloved kids Ikram, Yasmin, Hamdi and Aisha With Love* 

> **Prof. Dr.-Ing. Abdulmotaleb El Saddik**, FIEEE, FCAE, FEIC, P.Eng. University Research Chair in Ambient Interactive Media & Communications, Director: Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab), School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Canada
