Virtual Feeling
An EU-funded project is working on an haptic device that will allow users to “feel” the fabric.
[From IST-Result: http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/]
You can choose garment styles, colours and sizes on the internet – but how do you know what the fabric feels like? The team in one IST project – HAPTEX – are working on an answer.
Many people consider buying garments on the internet as a timesaving and hassle-free way to replenish their wardrobes. But it can be difficult to fully assess the final product before it arrives in your postbox. The HAPTEX project team has developed a preliminary demonstrator that could eventually help buyers get a ‘virtual feel’ for sweaters, suits, lingerie et al before they make an online purchase.
“We are investigating how far it is possible to provide a user with a completely reliable sense of fabric through a virtual experience,†says project coordinator Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann of the University of Geneva.
‘Feeling’ a virtual garment
The HAPTEX partners are working on multimodal perception of textiles in virtual environments. Their goal is to achieve, by project close in November 2007, a visual representation of virtual textiles with a haptic/tactile interface, which will allow users to ‘feel’ the virtual garment.
The word haptic comes from the Greek haptikos, which means ‘able to touch’. Haptics is gaining widespread acceptance as a key component in virtual reality systems, adding the sense of touch to what was once a visual-only solution. 
Most existing solutions use stylus-based haptic rendering, where the user interfaces with the virtual world using a tool or stylus, giving a form of interaction that is computationally realistic on today’s computers. In HAPTEX, both the visual simulation and the haptic rendering are based on the real physical properties of the textile, as measured at the source.
The project team’s final goal is to integrate two different haptic technologies: a device which can ‘feel’ the kinesthetic forces acting on the simulated virtual fabric, and tactile arrays on two fingertips to show the vibrotactile stimulations on the surface of the simulated fabric.
Currently, there is no comparable system either on the market or in the development stage. To integrate the visual and haptic/tactile interfaces, several significant advances in existing technology are necessary before the virtual experience can come close to simulating a real physical touch.
[read more at http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/]