Applied Interactive Multimedia Laboratory

The Applied Interactive Multimedia (AIM) research group at New York University Abu Dhabi is working with diverse facets of interactive multimedia and immersive multimodal systems. Our interest includes the conception, engineering, and utilization of novel haptic interfaces as a new media in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). AIM investigates the acquisition, communication, and display of spatial, temporal, and physical knowledge of perceived reality through the human sense of touch and the integration/coordination of this knowledge with other sensory displays (such as audio, video, text, smell, etc.) in a general multimedia system. Several applications are of our interest including multimodal learning, gaming, and interpersonal communication.

The AIM lab is pursuing research in the area of affective haptics. Affective Haptics is an emerging area of research that related to, arises from, or influences emotion and enable affective interaction by means of sense of touch. Our goal is to explore the following areas:

•  acquisition of human emotions via haptic modality;
•  display of human emotions using haptic display devices;
•  and enhancement of user’s affective state and reproduction of feeling of social touch by means of haptic stimulation.