The way we perceive the world around us is dependent upon the senses inherited. Humans are blessed with five primary senses: Touch, olfactory sense, taste, hearing and vision. For all these primary senses, there is a dedicated portion in brain which works as processing unit and they have a receptor organ. Vision has most of the part in brain while touch has the longest reception region. To enable the sense of touch different receptors are spread beneath the layers of skin over the entire body, which are responsible for different aspects of touch. Touch is divided into two major categories: active and passive touch. Active touch is when user is actively exploring the world around using their skin and passive touch is when the world around the user is touching the user, like the shirt user is wearing is touching passively all the time. Objective of haptic augmentation is to use these massive numbers of receptors which are mostly unused all the time and provide the user information to the world around in a more scientific manner.
In this machine dependent world, where we are dependent on computers or handheld devices for most of the task in our daily life, that overburdens our eyes and the result one can see in the society with how many people are becoming dependent on glasses for their vision. With haptic augmentation, Sensory overload has been reduced in many applications such as a pilot sitting in cockpit, who is overloaded with flooding information. Another perspective for the usage of haptic augmentation is feeling the virtual or tele-world. Surgeons in a tele-surgery, a gamer playing in virtual reality and even our day-to-day life relies on the vibrational feedback of the mobile phones.
Haptic augmentation enables the human being to expand the horizon in the sensory inputs one can receive from the world around. One classic example for this is enabling the users to perceive the lower frequencies which human ears can’t hear. The audible frequency range is 20 Hz to 20 KHz however, existing technology of sound production struggles in producing the audio frequencies lower than 60 Hz. Sometimes, even if they produce these lower frequencies, it doesn’t transmit to cochlea without distortion. Whereas human skin is sensitive enough to detect these frequencies and transmit to somatosensory cortex without being interfered by ambient noise.
When someone plans to experience nature and walks down to a full grown-wheat farm, the feelings are completely different than what we watch in a movie or see the pictures of it. The feeling of a real wheat field is much beyond just watching the wheat grown in harmony with same color and size or hearing the recorded sound of the wheat barley colliding themselves. This difference is the missing information to the feeling of touching the pinching head of the barley, scrolling the palm through it, the feel of breeze passing through it and smell. Haptic augmentations aim to fulfill these all missing feelings.
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