1. Motivation and Application of Haptic Systems

This chapter introduces the philosophical and social aspects of the human haptic sense as a basis for systems addressing this human sensory channel. Several definitions of haptics as a perception and interaction modality are reviewed to serve as a common basis in the course of the book. Typical application areas such as telepresence, training, and interaction with virtual environments and communications are presented, and typical haptic systems from these are reviewed. The use of haptics in technical systems is the topic of this book. But what is haptics in the first place? A common and general definition is given as

but this will probably not suffice for the purpose of this book. This chapter gives a detailed insight into the definition of haptics (Sect. 1.2) and introduces four general classes of applications for haptic systems (Sect. 1.3) as the motivation for the design of haptic systems and—ultimately—for this book. Before that, we give a short summary of the philosophical and social aspects of this human sense (Sect. 1.1). These topics are not addressed any further in this book, but should be kept in mind by every engineer working on haptics.