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I'm a mechanical engineering professor
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at the University of Pennsylvania
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and my favorite hobby is photography.
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And as I travel around the world,
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I love taking photographs like these
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so I can remember all the beautiful
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and interesting things that I've seen.
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But what I can't do is record and share
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how these objects feel to touch.
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And that's kind of surprising
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because your sense of touch is really important.
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It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day,
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every manipulation task,
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anything you do in the world.
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And so the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting.
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It has two main components.
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The first is tactile sensations,
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things you feel in your skin.
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And the second is kinesthetic sensations,
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and this has to do with the position of your body,
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and how it's moving,
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and the forces you encounter.
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And you're really good at incorporating
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both of these types of sensations together
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to understand the physical interactions
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you have with the world
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and understand as you touch a surface,
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is it a rock, is it a cat, is it a bunny, what is it?
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And so, as an engineer, I'm really fascinated
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and I have a lot of respect for
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how good people are with their hands.
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And I'm intrigued and curious
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about whether we could make technology better
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by doing a better job at leveraging
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the human capability with the sense of touch.
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Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines
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by letting you take advantage of your hands?
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And indeed, I think we can,
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and that's at the core of a field called "haptics,"
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and this is the area that I work in.
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It's all about interactive touch technology.
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And the way it works is,
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as you move your body through the world,
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if, as an engineer, I can make a system
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that can measure that motion,
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and then present to you sensations over time
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that kind of make sense,
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that match up with what you might feel in the real world,
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I can fool you into thinking you're touching something
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even though there's nothing there.
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