Best Paper Award for Irene Kuling
A paper written by Irene Kuling, in collaboration with Bharat Dandu and Yon Visell, was chosen for the IEEE Transaction on Haptics Best Paper Award.
The paper (Proprioceptive Localization of the Fingers: Coarse, Biased, and Context-Sensitive) examines how well you can perceive the position of your fingers without looking at your fingers. Although we use our fingers daily and their position is important for tactile exploration and fine manipulation this had not been studied before.
Irene Kuling, associate professor in the Dynamics & Control section, in collaboration with Bharat Dandu and Yon Visell (both from the University of California, Santa Barabara), conducted two experiments showing that there is a mismatch between the position where you feel your finger and where you see it. This mismatch is smaller at the time when more contextual information is available, such as the position of the other fingers. This implies that for fine motor behavior in applications such as Virtual Reality (VR) or teleoperation, it is necessary to provide sufficient contextual information about the context for accurate finger position perception.
Award
The paper was published back in 2020 in the journal IEEE Transactions on Haptics (ToH). This journal is considered worldwide as one of the leading journals in the field of science, technology and applications associated with information acquisition and object manipulation through touch, also known as haptic perception. Each year, the IEEE Robotics and Automotion Society presents this award to one paper published in the previous calendar year that prioritizes scientific and technological excellence.
Kuling is very happy with the award.
It’s very nice to win this award. It's a great validation for our work on 'how to know where your hands are' and it shows that the Haptics community understands that this is that that is an important step in VR and haptic technology.