Tactile reproduction technology creates a tactile sense as if one actually touches or grasps an object in virtual reality (VR) or extended reality (XR). As it has a high expectation of use, many global companies including Microsoft and Meta are continuously developing.

Following this trend of the time, a team of Professor Jung Yei-hwan from the Department of Electronic Engineering developed a skin-integrated wireless haptic interface. The developed technology is evaluated to be utilizable in wireless medical fields since it can not only give new experience to our long-distance relationships and entertainment fields but also provide sensory feedback to artificial organs. 

Previous devices that reproduced haptic interfaces used wired systems were restricted in their behavior since they and their heavy weight and big volume made them hard to use and give less convenience. Also, realistic tactile sense reproduction was in fact impossible since it was hard to deliver various time and spatial patterns to the skin.

To solve the problem, professor Jung's team developed an elastic skin-integrated haptic interface that is △ lighter, △ wireless, and △ can give various stimuli. Jung's haptic interface is thinner and lighter than the previous ones and minimized behavior restrictions by enabling wireless communication and wireless charging.

At the core of the technology, there is a system combining hundreds of millimeter-scale actuators that are individually programmable. Each actuator is custom-designed to maximize sensors that make individual tactile sense and deliver. The completed system is wirelessly connected to a touchscreen-based graphic user interface such as smartphones or tablet PCs. Through this, when a user writes on a touch screen, the sensory pattern is generated in real-time through vibration interfaces.

The technology that Professor Jung's team developed is expected to bring a new paradigm to various fields by adding tactile sense to a VR based on visual and acoustic senses. The team showed various applicable fields such as visualizing navigation systems with tactile patterns that were visual-based or transferring a music track into tactile patterns. Also, for amputated patients using robotic supplement control, the team used sensory patterns delivered from the developed haptic interfaces as a sensory supplement, showing its potential in the medical field as well.

This research was conducted under the support of the Young Researcher Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea and Hanyang University, and on May 23, it was published in a world-class electronics journal, 「Nature Electronics, IF 33.686」.