This talk summarizes the work done on presentation of distal environment information through touch-based human computer interfaces. The haptics research team at Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing has developed a system that enables individuals who are blind to perceive objects in distal environment through haptic user interfaces (where haptics refers to the science of touch) within 2-5 seconds. Further a system has been developed to enable color perception through haptics. Both these systems have achieved near 100% recognition accuracy with learning times of 30-45 minutes.

In this talk, I will present the methodology used to design thesystem. It involves controlled psychological and physiological experiments and incorporation of the results in the computational system. I will also present how this methodology is currently being expanded to other domains such as rehabilitation and surgical simulation.