Advances in collaborative Haptic audio visual invironments

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With the significant progress in haptic technologies (Nintendo Wii (http://wii.nintendo.com/), iPhone (http://www.apple.com/iphone/), etc.), the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the e-society's human activities, including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce, and science, would forever change if we learn how to capture, manipulate, and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move beyond today's state of the art, many commercial and technological barriers are to be surmounted. First, business models/frameworks are needed to make haptic devices practical, inexpensive, and widely accessible with an ultimate goal to make a haptic device as easy to plug in as the mouse in a computer. Moreover, multipoint, multihand, and multiperson interaction scenarios need further investigation to reach enticingly rich interactivity. Finally, we should not forget that collaborative touch and physical interaction are among the fundamental questions in haptic systems development. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information that might reflect a desire to speak a physically-based language that has never been explored before.