Affective haptics

Affective haptics is an area of research which focuses on the study and design of devices and systems that can elicit, enhance, or influence the emotional state of a human by means of sense of touch.

It was proven that we can easily evoke our emotions by something as simple as changing facial expression (e.g., smile brings on a feeling of happiness).

Different types of tactile corpuscles allow us sensing thermal property of the object, pressure, vibration frequency, and stimuli location.

[6] Online interactions rely heavily on vision and hearing, so a substantial need exists for mediated social touch.

Recently, researchers have made several attempts to create a hugging device providing some sense of physical co-presence over a distance.

[8][9] HaptiHug's[10] key feature is that it physically reproduces the human-hug pattern, generating pressure simultaneously on each user's chest and back.

The Kiiroo SVir is a good example of an Adult CyberToy that incorporates tactile input, by means of a surface that is touch capacitive, and an inside that is kinesthetic in nature.

The SVir enables women to have intercourse with their partner through use of the OPue interactive vibrator no matter how great the distance that separates the couple.

HaptiButterfly[2] reproduces “butterflies in your stomach” (the fluttery or tickling feeling felt by people experiencing love) through arrays of vibration motors attached to the user's abdomen.

Emotional information is extracted by using such techniques as speech recognition, natural language processing, facial expression detection, and measurement of physiological data.

system, great importance is placed on the automatic sensing of emotions conveyed through textual messages in 3D virtual world Second Life (artificial intelligence), the visualization of the detected emotions by avatars in virtual environment, enhancement of user's affective state, and reproduction of feeling of social touch (e.g., hug) by means of haptic stimulation in a real world.