Feeling things by touching the screen of your smartphone

Imagine you touched the screen of your smartphone and could feel the brush strokes of Van Gogh, the fur of your beloved pet on a zoom call, fabrics in online shopping or tissues in medical images. Yasemin Vardar, assistant professor at the Department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR), wants to enable this breakthrough by developing a new sensation-based texture rendering algorithm for friction-modulation haptic displays. This week she received Veni funding from NWO for her research idea.

Yasemin Vardar: “With the invention of friction-modulation haptic displays that render the tactile sensation of running our fingers over textured surfaces, it will be possible to feel the texture of objects in digital images.However, a major bottleneck is that they depend on ad-hoc databases of previously recorded finger interactions. Available databases are limited to only a tiny subset of the plethora of real-world surfaces that exist. Expanding them with high-fidelity recordings of each surface is costly and practically infeasible. I will enable this breakthrough by formulating a generic parameterized model that can emulate any tactile texture across diverse human sensations like roughness, and slipperiness. My research has the potential to create a scientific and societal impact on diverse areas, including communication, robotics, medicine, art, rehabilitation, and e-commerce.”

Veni

78 promising young scientists receive Veni funding of up to 280,000 euros from NWO. This concerns sixty researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW) domain and eighteen from the Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW) domain, who can further develop their own research ideas over the next three years. The Venis for the ENW and ZonMW domains were announced in December 2021. Nine TU Delft researchers received the SGW and TTW Grant. Read more: Veni grants for nine leading TU Delft researchers (tudelft.nl)