It's been a pretty exciting month, all told. There has been less teaching, since we have all the exam boards out the way, though resits need to be organised, and there are always some late submissions that need to be dealt with. The month has instead been dominated by: the second ever ITDF in-person meeting (and the first one I attended!); my trip to the Netherlands for World Haptics 2023 in Delft and to visit Bartimeus near Utrecht, and then my trip to Frinton to visit Russ Palmer and Riitta Lahtinen. All of which has been great, though I suspect I will need another month or so to let my brain process all the ideas that have built up in there!
I am conscious that space here is limited, and I need to get start getting some none "Month in Review" posts up, so I'll try to get some more detailed posts on these topics slotted in around them! Anyway, here are the month's highlights:
1) ITDF Meeting: The ITDF Project is 3 and a half years old, with just seventeen months left at the time of writing. But COVID (which hit in the third month of the project) meant that we've really largely worked online. There was a face-to-face meeting in December 2021 (but I had teaching commitments and couldn't go); we tried to organise another in July 2022 but the record-breaking heat wave meant it was moved online; so this was actually the first in-person full group meeting I had attended since the kick-off meeting in January 2020 (which was before any of the researchers were recruited onto the project). Anyway, an excellent couple of days - it makes a real difference being in person, and we had some great discussions on Posthumanism and design; some excellent activities and discussion as part of filmaker Sarah Brown's ALT-TEXT session; and even the Work Package reporting was much more lively than usual. Above all, it was great to see all those who were able to attend in person! We must do more of these in the time that remains...
2) World Haptics 2023: This was my first World Haptics Conference, and my first conference post-COVID. It took place in Delft, and was absolutely huge. Over 400 attendees, with a day of workshops followed by three days of talks and Demos. There were some excellent presentations, particularly the three keynote speakers. Professor Tamar Makin from Cambridge University presented some fascinating work on the brain and prosthetic use, particularly by looking at how people learned to use the Third Thumb Prosthetic by Dani Clode; Professor Hiroyuki Shinoda from the University of Tokyo, who gave a fascinating talk about mid-air haptics and whether this will be the next frontier of haptics; and Professor Hong Z. Tan from Purdue University, who gave an interesting presentation about the challenges of doing psychophysics in a commercial environment, reflecting on her substantial consulting experience and work at Google. Highlights from the rest of the conference were the hands on-demos (a pretty critical part of anything related to haptics), both academic and commercial: I finally got the chance to try force feedback in haptic gloves courtesy of the SenseGlove team; fulfil my long held ambition to experience the Ultraleap (it's... interesting and I don't mean that in a negative way - it's just intrinsically so different to what I've experienced in other haptics that it takes a bit of getting used to); I got to try the bhaptic TactSuit (which I liked enough to buy one as soon as I got back - it basically contains a grid similar to the one we used in SUITCEYES, but the vest is very nicely engineered, and the Haptic Design tools are really useful); and to explore more hands-on uses of Actronika's HapCoil motors (which I liked a lot, but I've already got twenty-two them, plus a Skinetic vest). I also got to run my own demo, which was great - it's at least doubled the number of people we've tested the Haptic Sleeve with, and it's thrown up some really interesting insights, that I must explore further. It was also great to get to see a number of familiar faces from my time at the Brocher Workshop (Ben Cherrier-Ward, Lili Golmohammadi and India Morrison were all there) and SUITCEYES (Astrid Kappers and Myrthe Plaisier); to fulfil my long-held ambition to accost Ad Spiers of Imperial College about how much I like his shape-changing interfaces; and to meet Lucia Seminara whose TACTA initiative is of particular interest to those of us on the ITDF Project. There is much to say on all this, so hopefully one or more blog posts will come out of it!
3) Visit to Bartimeus: Bartimeus are a Dutch expertise centre for people with Dual Sensory Impairments, particularly, but not exclusively those with learning difficulties. Mijkje Worm runs the DeafBlind International Technology Network, of which I am a member, and it was through her that I had arranged to meet several of her colleagues. They very kindly spare a whole day for me, to talk about their FabLab and their experiences with Haptic Communication and to show me their facilities. It was a great day, really informative for me, and I look forward to following up with them.
4) Visit to Russ and Riitta: Russ Palmer and Riitta Lahtinen are two of our mentors on the ITDF project, and as I write this, I am sat in Clacton-on-Sea, having come down to visit them (in nearby Frinton-on-Sea) to talk Social Haptics, demonstrate various bits of kit, and talk about our upcoming contribution to the special issue of the British Medical Journal - Medical Humanities that is being organised through ITDF. It's been a very productive weekend - we got to put the TactSuit and HapCoils to good use, and my knowledge of Haptices and Haptemes has greatly expanded. It's always a pleasure to meet them, and at the moment my head barely feels like it can contain the volume of new ideas swimming around in there.
5) Graduations: Finally, for the first time in four years I got to attend our Graduation Ceremony (after several years being cancelled due to COVID, and once the University resumed holding them last year, I got COVIDd couldn't attend!). Anyway, I love graduations - partly because I get to swan around in doctoral robes, but largely because it's great to celebrate our students' success and give them a big send-off.
So what I'm saying is, it's been a busy month, but a fruitful one. This posts long enough, so I'm off to have a lie down, and if anything especially exciting happens in the last two days of the month, it'll just have to be written up in August.
