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

当我们与物理世界互动时，触摸是一个至关重要的感官渠道，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足，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。这项由三家机构的科学家参与的合作研究的目标是授权内容创造者，通过使人们能够用触觉纹理进行与他们通常用照片进行的相同类型的操作。这些操作包括“捕获”纹理，建立它的数学表示，创建和显示与原始纹理非常相似的合成版本，以各种方式增强它（例如，使其更粗糙或更柔软），最终“组成”新奇的纹理，但仍然感觉真实可信。作为朝着这个方向迈出的切实一步，一个在NSF之前的支持下开始的开源、开放硬件项目将继续和扩展。这个项目导致了表面触觉设备分布到大约十几个不同的实验室，导致了各种各样的研究。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社区的大约50个早期采用者。这些人将参与这项研究（例如，通过帮助“标记”各种纹理），并将被授权进行自己的研究。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。这项工作是及时和令人信服的，原因有很多。第一，近年来，对纹理感知的物理和神经元基础的科学理解有了很大的进展。例如，皮肤上的振动（当手指滑过表面时产生）、传入神经元的脉冲时间和高级感知（如识别特定纹理）之间的关系最近得到了阐明。第二，“表面触觉”技术也取得了显著的进步，可以在触觉敏锐度的所有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，如儿童电子书、盲人界面、游戏和汽车控制面板，这些都需要高质量的触觉内容。这项研究的优点在于，它将为内容的创建和操作提供一个原则性的基础。贡献将包括：“触觉相机”的开发，能够捕捉相关的摩擦和振动数据，从中可以重建逼真的纹理；纹理突出方面的新颖数学表示以及基于该表示合成人工纹理的算法；通过对数学表示的直接操作，多个纹理之间的插值以及与音频线索的交互来增强纹理方面的一套技术；最后给出了一套用于合成新纹理的工具，包括搜索、纹理组合和尺度变换。

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.