Message from the 1992 inaugural haptics symposium cochairs

In 1992 we organized the first in the series of meetings that have come to be known as the Haptics Symposium. Ours was a modest effort. The “symposium” was really just a pair of sessions at the ASME´s Winter Annual Meeting. Nine talks were given. The whole thing lasted a couple of hours. There was no banquet, no entertainment, no committee meetings or workshops. The session wasn´t even the largest haptics meeting held that year: a couple of months later it was eclipsed by an SPIE meeting titled “Telemanipulator Technology,” boasting 32 papers, two-thirds of which were haptic in nature.