Seminar: Touch and Haptic Interfaces / Summer term 2021

Description

Touch interaction has become the predominant way of interaction with modern computing devices.  However, the gestures that we routinely use on touchscreens are just the tip of the iceberg: they represent only the beginning of a future that comprises much more advanced touch and haptic interfaces. These interfaces will include rich haptic feedback. They will go beyond simple touch contact and instead leverage on the rich characteristics of how humans touch and manipulate objects. And they will extend beyond the confines of a rigid and rectangular touchscreen and get integrated into clothing, the human body, the physical environment, or a virtual reality experience.

In this seminar, we will cover advanced research topics in the area of touch and haptic interfaces. This comprises research papers from the following areas:

• Touch sensing
• Design and detection of touch gestures
• Rich touch interactions beyond simple touch contact
• Touch on and around the device
• Touch on tiny devices
• Ultra-mobile microgestures
• Haptic feedback
• Haptics in AR and VR
• Touch on the body
• Social touch
• Touch on interactive textiles
• Touch interaction with robots

Activities

We will focus on recent research results that were published at top-tier conferences and journals.  The seminar targets students who are interested in getting a solid overview of recent trends and the state-of-the-art in touch and haptic interfaces and in learning about academic presentation and writing. We will concentrate on reading, presenting, and discussing, and on writing a final term paper. The seminar does not include a practical course project.

• Knowledge of the research landscape in touch and haptics interfaces, including major conferences and journals, leading research labs
• Solid overview of the state-of-the-art in touch and haptics interfaces
• In-depth knowledge of the state-of-the-art of one trending topic
• Skills in literature search
• Skills in preparing and giving an academic presentation
• Skills in academic writing

• Literature search and conceptual structuring in a selected area (two papers will be given as starting point)
• Giving one talk in the seminar
• Actively contributing to the discussion during seminar sessions
• Moderating one seminar session
• Writing a final term paper

Covid-19

The seminar will be fully virtual. Weekly seminar sessions will be held using Zoom. Active participation in those sessions is mandatory.

Eligibility and Prerequisites

This is a Master-level seminar. Eligible are students from: Master in Computer Science, Master in Media Informatics, Master in Embedded Systems or Master in DSAI. Final-year Bachelor students may be admitted in exceptional cases per individual request if they have strong prior experience in the area (in this case please describe your case when applying on the seminar portal).

Participants should have attended either the lecture Human-Computer Interaction or the lecture Interactive Systems (or a similar lecture at another university).

Registration

Please register through the seminar portal offered by the computer science department:
https://seminars.cs.uni-saarland.de/seminars21 .

• Include a brief statement about your motivation for this seminar.
• In addition, please indicate your study program, your semester of study and the classes you have already taken in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.

The maximum number of participants is 10.

Literature

A list with topics and literature will be made available here soon.

Organizer

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Steimle

Contact

Please direct all organization-related or registration-related questions to Natalia Weis nweis@mmci.uni-saarland.de