Towards innovative methods for multimodal interactions with advanced media and serious gaming

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A new interaction dimension that can be incorporated with online social virtual worlds is the sense of touch, or haptics. Haptics refers to manual interactions with the ambient environment, such as exploration for information extraction or manipulation for modifying the environment. A potential application for haptics is to enhance interpersonal communication to express affection, intention or emotion; such as a handshake, and physical contact. Therefore, adding haptics to social virtual worlds brings several benefits and possibilities for the participants. We believe that the field of haptics is still in its infancy. Most of the challenges discussed in the proposal are hot research topics in this field, and some of them are currently being studied. Advances on each of these described fronts are certainly to be expected in the near future. As the prices of haptic devices drop, gaming industries will be the first ones to take notice and exploit the technology to complement their playing consoles, thereby creating a significant advantage over their competitors. Home rehabilitation applications will most certainly follow. Governments are desperate to reduce healthcare costs, so development of practical applications of this sort would be encouraged and funded. In addition, haptic technology will undoubtedly gain an important place in the education sector. New educational approaches rely on visual and auditory demonstrations to describe unintuitive concepts to students; the incorporation of the sense of touch is simply a natural progression of this trend to newer media.