Professor Seungmoon Choi of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering won the the Best Demonstration Award at the Haptics Symposium 2010, held from March 25th to 26th in Waltham, MA, USA.

The Haptics Symposium is an authoritative symposium in the subject of Haptics, the study of the sense of touch, was first established in 1992 and has had its 18th symposium up to now. This year’s symposium’s acceptance rate of regular papers and short papers was 29% and 18% respectively. The collection of papers is being published by the IEEE.

The Haptics Symposium awards four awards: Best Paper Award, Best Student Paper Award, Best Poster Award, and Best Demonstration Award. Professor Choi and his laboratory presented three regular papers and two short papers. The papers of professor Choi were nominated as final candidates in each of the four awards and he was awarded Best Demonstration Award. As real touching of the subject is important in the field of Haptics, 34 demos were also submitted.

The Best Demonstration Award winning paper was Seokhee Jeon and Seungmoon Choi’s  “Stiffness Modulation for Haptic Augmented Reality: Extension to 3D Interaction,”included in the Proceedings of the Haptics Symposium 2010. The content of the paper was about augmented reality, changing the characteristic of an object by adding imaginary forces while touching it in reality. The algorithm on the movement of the hand was proposed and verified. This algorithm was the first one to be built systemically and received favorable comments by demonstrating the use of the algorithm on a mannequin with breast cancer.