Development of a haptic video chat system

摘要

Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is important to interpersonal communication, as it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by some haptic telecommunication softwares, this paper presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to further increase people's degree of immersion with the haptic video chat system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This paper also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.