Discussion with Tomer Shalit
posted Feb 7th 2007, 03:22 under discussion, IDL, research
Today I was able to meet with Tomer Shalit, an entrepeneur and researcher here in Umeċ. Tomer has been involved with haptics and tactility for many years, working on various projects at IDL and setting up ReachIn.
The discussion I had with him was very interesting. Tomer did a lot of work and research in the field of haptics. He said that even after years of research, there is still no meaningful haptic language that is developed and recognized. His work was (at that time) trying to find basic haptic feedback that could really mean or signify something to users. Yes a lot of it possible with new technology, but what is really meaningful and quickly understandable? How two short vibrating pulses differ from three short ones, or two long ones. Can the user understand a vibrating ramp, progression or pattern adequately?
He mentioned various projects he worked on, but he referred to two that would be specifically interesting in regard to my degree project: Gesture Experience Prototype and Recall of abstract entities. It's funny to think that these two research projects were conducted 3-4 years ago, and now I think this stuff is new and interesting. History repeats itself for sure. The more I read about haptics and tactility, the more I realized that a lot has been done and published 5 or 10 years ago. Maybe I'm too late with this, maybe not. Anyways, Tomer suggested that I should dig further into these two projects and discuss with Oskar Fjellström, one of the principal researcher. He also pointed that a lot has been left unexplored with these projects, that there is definitely room for working more in this area.
Overall, I'm very glad to have discussed with Tomer. His experience with gesture and tactile based projects is impressive. I discovered that really good projects on the topic has been conducted right here in Umeċ some years ago. I hope I can learn a lot from these past projects and hopefully that I can proceed with a degree project that is not recycling previous works, but providing an evolution or a step forward on these thoughts.