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

一个可以与在线社交虚拟世界结合的新的交互维度是触觉，或触觉。触觉指的是与周围环境的手动交互，例如用于信息提取的探索或用于修改环境的操纵。触觉的一个潜在应用是增强人际沟通，以表达感情，意图或情感;例如握手和身体接触。因此，将触觉添加到社交虚拟世界为参与者带来了几个好处和可能性。 我们认为触觉领域仍处于起步阶段。提案中讨论的大多数挑战都是该领域的热门研究课题，其中一些目前正在研究中。在不久的将来，在上述每一个方面都肯定会取得进展。随着触觉设备价格的下降，游戏行业将首先注意到并利用这项技术来补充他们的游戏机，从而创造出比竞争对手更大的优势。家庭康复应用肯定会随之而来。政府迫切希望降低医疗成本，因此这类实际应用的开发将得到鼓励和资助。此外，触觉技术无疑将在教育领域获得重要地位。新的教育方法依赖于视觉和听觉演示来向学生描述非直觉的概念;触觉的结合只是这种趋势向新媒体的自然发展。

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.