"The Queen of Haptics is Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, the brilliant Stanford-trained engineer who oversees the haptics group at the GRASP lab. Kuchenbecker says, 'It’s like recording a certain natural sound, like a waterfall, and then being able to generate a synthetic sound that sounds the same but goes on forever and never repeats, so it’s not just a looped recording.'" more

"A small device similar to a pulse-oxygen monitor you’d wear at the hospital was fitted onto your index finger. It used small motors to move pads that were in contact with your fingertip to create the illusion of texture. After putting on a pair of virtual reality goggles, you could touch the smooth surface of an egg or a dinosaur’s rough skin. You could feel the edges of a wooden crate or press the surface of a paper sack of flour and feel it deform a bit."  - more

"Have you ever gotten so wrapped up in an immersive virtual experience that you reach out to touch something, and when you can’t this realisation immediately kills the illusion and takes you away from enjoying the experience? Tactai Touch offers a solution. With a small wearable attached to my finger, I could feel a soft teddy bear, the different textures of fabrics, hold a small statue in my hands, and use a virtual remote control that replicates the feeling of pressing the buttons.."  - more

"What's perhaps most impressive about Tactai's technology is that it's already affordable, with current prototypes costing less than $12 to make. And Domenikos says that if a large technology or consumer electronics company licenses their technology and manufactures it at a large scale, it could push costs even further down." more...

"One of the mainstream objections to VR has been that you can't actually "feel" the things you're interacting with in the virtual world.  Well, that's changing. Today, there are a handful of ways to preserve the sense of touch in virtual reality, and Tactai is one of the companies leading the way. more...