From two-handed manipulation of 3D environments to tactile displays and new languages for talking to robots, there’s a big world out there way beyond the reach of your fanciest graphics card. We will have the good fortune of hearing from four prominent researchers from Germany, the UK and Canada who may convince many of us that the future lies not in more elaborate shader algorithms, but in ... the palm of our hand!

Come hear about recent developments in haptic and tangible interfaces in the comfort of the auditorium of the brand-new Bibliothèque Nationale.

After covering a variety of input devices for controlling three-dimensional applications, Bernd Fröhlich will introduce a scheme for classifying these devices and show how this can be used to systematically explore the design space. The GlobeFish device is a six-degree-of-freedom desktop device which allows natural separation of translational and rotational input. Recently introduced stereoscopic displays supporting multiple tracked users enable co-located multi-viewer interactions in which each user may participate in a particular task. These scenarios provide many challenges for the advanced design of appropriate devices and interaction techniques.

Access to graphical data visualizations such as charts and graphs is a problem for those who are visually challenged. Currently available presentation techniques are slow, cumbersome and inflexible, and may lose many of the qualities that make them useful in the first place. David McGookin will outline work undertaken in the MultiVis project to provide better access using both virtual haptic technology and non-speech audio, showing how such technology can improve both the browsing and authoring of visualizations.

Designing haptic signals to enrich technology interactions requires a clear understanding of the task, the user and the intricate affordances of touch. This is especially true when the haptics are not implemented as direct renderings of real world forces and textures, but as new interactions designed to convey meaning in new physical ways and to support communication. Karon MacLean will discuss several avenues for exploring and building a haptic language that will effectively support communication, including signaling and monitoring, expressive communication and shared control, with an emphasis on the importance of process, appropriate tools and representations.

The Haptics Lab at McGill has been working on several new devices: a handheld vibro-tactile device, a contact location display, a planar direct-drive force-feedback device, and a high-density distributed tactile display (named "MicroTactus", "Morpheotron", "Pantograph", and "StreSS", respectively). Each of these targets a specific approach to mediate haptic interaction. In each case, Vincent Hayward will discuss recent enhancements, what drives performance and what provides effectiveness.