TouchlessAI Official Website
With Orestis Georgiou, William Frier, Rafa Morales, and Dario Pittera.
This 4-year R&D project is funded by the EU H2020 program. Motivated by the rise of social media and the absence of touch, our team of experts from 3 universities and 3 industry partners is developing the next-generation of TOUCHLESS haptic technologies. Our ambition is to enable novel social experiences through touch.
Our sense of touch enables us to understand our environment but also serves emotional purposes. For example, it provides information (surfaces, textures), it warns us (heat, thorns), it soothes and bonds us (caressing, hugging). Yet, current online and digital interactions make limited use of our sense of touch, often because most haptic technologies require us to wear or hold something, while their capacity to deliver rich tactile sensations is limited compared to how we naturally apply our touch sense in our offline physical and social interactions. Using novel neurocognitive models and AI frameworks, our aim is to imbue our novel TOUCHLESS haptic technologies with the ability to affect and enrich our online social interactions.
Partners include UCL, University of Copenhagen, and UpnaLab, plus industry partners SoftServe and Crowdhelix.
Some of the key aspects this work will investigate are:
- The design of tactile experiences that have the ability to affect agency, bonding, and attachment.
- The generation of methods through which social and affective touch can be produced and subsequently transferred by users remotely.
- Establish feature sets that can be used to predict user intention in order to automate the synthesis of immersive tactile feedback.
Abstract
Our society is experiencing an increasing lack of social tactile interactions, due in part to increased virtualisation and the growth of digital networks, and recently magnified by social distancing measures. Sadly, many people now feel like the society described in the 1990s science fiction movie Demolition Man, where physical contact was prevented and heavily sanctioned. The increased virtualisation of our social interactions feeds our hunger for touch, the lack of which can lead to profoundly negative consequences. Interpersonal touch grounds social relations between people, with distinct patterns of tactile interaction between parent-infant dyads, adult life-partners, friends, teachers and professional colleagues and acquaintances.
Although touch is vital for how we feel and interact with our environments and is foundational for our emotional well-being, most haptic technologies have focused on functional aspects. All major haptics companies use touch to help users improve task completion, discriminate among shapes or textures, and grasp virtual objects. In contrast, social touch typically involves the stimulation of non-glabrous (hairy) parts of the skin while also affecting nociceptors (pain) and thermoreceptors (temperature). These C-tactile (CT) afferents underpin the experience of affective touch, and the pleasant sensations associated with social interactions such as caresses. Thus, current technology neither satisfy our need for touch, nor draw on recent progress in understanding social touch.
Our ambition is to go beyond functional haptic technology and enable computer systems to intelligently create the experiences lost in the virtual transition. Those experiences include agency, bonding, and attachment.
We will develop the next generation of touchless haptic technologies using neurocognitive models and a novel artificial intelligence (AI) framework. Without having physical contact, users will receive affective, social and cognitive touch sensations.