Touch through: experiencing remote touch across different modalities

Abstract : This paper presents Touch Through (TT), an innovative smartphone application which provides an alternative way of experiencing interpersonal touch at a distance. Through the design of TT, we are interested in the issue of allowing people at a distance to share emotions and have a feeling of presence. The originality of our approach is to focus on the functional properties of touch highlighted by the study of sensory supplementation systems. TT transforms stimuli associated with touch into visual and/or auditory and/or vibratory sensations.