Haptic Data Compression and Communication

The past decade has witnessed how audio-visual communication has shaped the way humans interact with or through technical systems. In contemporary times, the potential of haptic communication has been recognized as being compelling to further augment human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction. In the context of immersive communication, video and audio compression are considered key enabling technologies for high-quality interaction. In contrast, the compression of haptic data is a field of research that is still relatively young and not fully explored. This disregards the fact that we as humans rely heavily on the haptic modality to interact with our environment. True immersion into a distant environment and efficient collaboration between multiple participants both require the ability to physically interact with objects in the remote environment. With recent advances in virtual reality, man-machine interaction, telerobotics, telepresence, and teleaction, haptic communication is proving instrumental in enabling many novel applications. The goal of this overview article is to summarize the state of the art and the challenges of haptic data compression and communication for telepresence and teleaction.