CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: TextureShop: Tools for the Composition and Display of Virtual Texture

当我们与物质世界互动时，触摸是至关重要的感觉通道，但当我们与数字世界互动时，情况还不是这样。从历史上看，这种情况可能主要是由于触觉显示不充分，但这种限制正在迅速消失。越来越多的主要限制是缺乏触觉内容。这项合作研究涉及三个机构的科学家，目的是通过让人们能够对触觉纹理执行与他们通常对照片执行的相同类型的操作，来增强内容创作者的能力。这些操作包括“捕捉”纹理，构建它的数学表示，创建和显示感觉非常像原始纹理的合成版本，以各种方式增强它(例如，使它变得更粗糙或更天鹅绒)，最终“组成”感觉真实和可信的新纹理。作为朝着这一方向迈出的切实一步，在之前NSF的支持下开始的一个开放源码、开放硬件项目将继续并扩大。该项目导致表面触觉设备被分发到大约12个不同的实验室，导致了各种研究研究。在这个项目中，一个低成本的表面触觉显示器和各种应用程序和软件工具将分发给研究界约50名早期采用者。这些人将参与这项研究(例如，通过帮助对各种纹理进行“标记”)，并将被授权进行他们自己的研究。此外，将在主要的人机交互会议上组织研讨会，以支持不断增长的表面触觉社区。这项工作是及时和引人注目的，原因有几个。第一，对质地感知的物理和神经基础的科学理解在最近几年有了很大的进步。例如，最近已经阐明了皮肤上的振动(当手指在表面滑动时产生的)、传入神经元的尖峰时间和高级知觉(如识别特定纹理)之间的关系。第二，用来显示裸露指尖纹理的“表面触觉”技术也有了显著的进步，现在可以在整个触觉敏锐度的全带宽上显示复杂的刺激。第三，触摸屏界面的流行创造了大量的应用程序，如儿童电子书、盲人界面、游戏和汽车控制面板，这些应用程序将得到高质量的触觉内容的很好服务。这项研究的价值在于，它将为内容的创作和处理提供一个原则性的基础。其贡献包括：开发一种能够捕捉相关摩擦和振动数据的“触觉相机”，可根据该数据重建逼真的纹理；一种新的纹理显著方面的数学表示，以及基于该表示合成人造纹理的算法；一套通过对数学表示的直接操作、多个纹理之间的内插以及与音频提示的交互来增强纹理方面的技术；以及最后一套用于合成新颖纹理的工具，包括搜索、纹理组合和比例变换。

When we interact with the physical world touch is a vitally important sensory channel, but when we interact with the digital world that is not yet the case. Historically, this situation may have been principally due to inadequate tactile displays, but that limitation is quickly disappearing. Increasingly, the principal limitation is the lack of tactile content. The goal of this collaborative research that involves scientists at three institutions is to empower the content creator, by enabling people to perform the same sorts of operations with tactile textures that they routinely perform with photographs. Those operations include "capturing" a texture, building a mathematical representation of it, creating and displaying synthetic versions that feel very much like the original, enhancing it in various ways (e.g., making it rougher or more velvety), and ultimately "composing" novel textures that nonetheless feel realistic and credible. As a tangible step in this direction, an open source, open hardware project begun under prior NSF support will be continued and expanded. That project resulted in the distribution of surface haptic devices to about a dozen different labs, leading to a variety of research studies. In this project, a low-cost surface haptic display and a variety of applications and software tools will be distributed to about 50 early adopters in the research community. Those individuals will be engaged in this research (e.g., by helping to "tag" various textures), and will be empowered to carry out their own research. In addition, workshops will be organized at major human-computer interaction conferences to support the growing surface haptics community.This work is timely and compelling for a number of reasons. One, scientific understanding of the physical and neuronal bases of texture perception has advanced considerably in recent years. For instance, the relationships between vibrations on the skin (produced when a finger slides across a surface), spike timing in afferent neurons, and high-level percepts such as recognition of a specific texture, have recently been elucidated. Two, "surface haptic" technologies for displaying texture to the bare fingertips have also advanced significantly and can now display complex stimuli across the full bandwidth of tactile acuity. Three, the prevalence of touch screen interfaces has created a plethora of applications such as children's e-books, interfaces for the blind, games, and automobile control panels, which would be well-served by high quality tactile content. The merit of this research is that it will provide a principled foundation for both the creation and manipulation of that content. Contributions will include: the development of a "tactile camera" that is able to capture the relevant frictional and vibratory data from which realistic textures can be recreated; a novel mathematical representation of the salient aspects of texture as well as algorithms for synthesizing artificial textures on the basis of that representation; a suite of techniques for enhancing aspects of texture by direct operation on the mathematical representation, interpolation between multiple textures, and interaction with audio cues; and finally a set of tools for composing novel textures including search, texture combination and scale transformation.