Summary

Haptic technology refers to any technology that can create an experience of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. There are four primary haptic modalities: vibration, button stimulation, thermal, and kinesthetic. With three major haptic systems: graspable, touchable, and wearable. What is experienced of haptics today is “low-fidelity” mainly vibrations which has been common for some time, most notably in game controllers and smartphones. Haptic progress today is in delivering richer and more diverse haptic feedback patterns across a variety of devices including handheld devices, gloves and suits.

Viability (3)

Lo-fi haptics though vibration and tactile feedback is widely deployed and experienced daily by billions of people through smartphones. More advanced haptics with higher resolution experiences are used for robotic teleoperation in particular robotic surgery. Current R&D is focused on providing richer contact sensations for wearable haptics like gloves and suits for Virtual Reality and robotics. Vibrotactile feedback is the most commonly used technology in haptics, with experimental research in cyclic stretches and thermal expansion and contraction of wires, the variable impedance enabled by layer jamming, and magnetorheological foam actuators. An open research question is how to achieve more abundant haptic feedback patterns through commercially popular handheld devices rather than gloves or suits.

Drivers (1)

On the supply-side, the cost of components for haptic systems, especially the vibrotactile actuator, has fallen as part of the smartphone dividend. Demand to move beyond simple vibration-based haptics comes from mixed reality (Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality) and robotic teleoperation. Both use cases require higher-fidelity haptics than is used on current computers such as force feedback to the whole hand, and diverse gestures with the full DoF of fingers for fine manipulation. These drivers are not powerful however as haptics is not a prerequisite for adoption as with bandwidth, computer power, and batteries.

Novelty (4)

In an abstract sense, all human senses gather information and respond to stimuli, and the feeling of touch is a combination of a receptors, the nervous system, and the somatosensory cortex. Haptics aim to replace and augment the receptor part of the system. In the long-term, Brain-Computer Interfaces can replace haptics entirely by directly modulating the somatosensory cortex to mimic the feeling of touch.

Diffusion (3)

Firstly, haptics experiences need to get richer before they are widely adopted. But the open challenge in haptics is how to deliver these richer experiences such as localized and diverse spatial-temporal vibrotactile patterns, texture feedback, thermal feedback, skin-stretch, softness, and contact on a handheld device. Wearables like gloves and suits are unwieldily and may be suitable for niche industrial use cases and unlikely to beat handheld devices for VR.

Impact (4) Medium certainty

In the future all virtual experiences will replicate every human sense from sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch to thermoception, nociception, equilibrioception and proprioception. Today haptic technology, mainly vibration, is like 8-bit computing. A high impact scenario sees high-resolution haptics as a phase change for Virtual Reality and Metaverse, bringing a real sense of presence and embodiment to virtual avatars. Embodiment might be the feature that finally makes Virtual Reality “better” than physical reality for most people unlocking a complex interplay of programmable sensations that cannot be replicated in the real world. As some point, haptics will be replaced with Brain-Computer Interfaces that do away with the need for physical receptors at all.

Timing (2030+) Medium certainty

The market was worth about $2.5 billion in 2020 and growing at about 10% a year. No immediate supply or demand side catalyst to change as still a lot of R&D required to move beyond vibrations to diversified tactile features such as frictions and texture. Haptic gloves might have strong demand for industrial use cases but unlikely to move the consumer market. If haptics is on the 2030+ timeline it’s progress will need to be considered alongside Brain-Computer Interfaces which will be an alternative candidate for artificial touch.