Haptics Community Web Page

Introduction
The Haptics Community Web Page grew out of a discussion held at the 1995 IMECE Symposium on Haptic Interface to Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems. Chris Hasser, formerly of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (now at Immersion Corp.), suggested the idea of a WWW site that would provide various sorts of information (people, publications, announcements, etc.) to those working in the area of haptic interface. Chris subsequently encouraged our group at Northwestern to take the lead in developing such a site, which we have done. The site was developed by Northwestern graduate students Mike Brown and Bernie Reger. Please have a look around. As you will see, it is not too glossy, but we think it provides the sort of database structure that can be quite useful at keeping us all up to date in a rapidly evolving field.

We have requested input from a sampling of researchers in the haptic interface community. This input will take the form of synopses of different areas of research being conducted around the world. Each synopsis will serve as an entry point for those interested in the field. It will likely introduce some of the classical concepts that prevail, and highlight issues for cutting-edge research. A broad evalutation of the state of the art can be found at the U.S. Navy's Office of Training Technology (OTT).

We plan to have introductory sections for each of the following research areas:

We welcome any suggestions that you might have for improving the Haptics Community Web Page. Finally, we encourage you to go ahead and add yourself to the Database, your papers and dissertations to the Library, your web pages to the Links, and announcements to the Bulletin Board.