EuroHaptics special issue editorial

Over the last five years, the EuroHaptics conference has grown from an ambitious idea to the primary European meeting for research in the field of human, machine, and computer haptics. The central idea of the meeting has always been interdisciplinarity—bringing together researchers from all fields related to haptics. This has been the original motto at the foundation of the conference in Zurich in the summer of 2000 by Matthias Harders and Alan Wing, and has been kept on throughout the subsequent annual events. Similar to the philosophy of the EuroHaptics community, the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP) focuses on the synergy between computer science and perception research by publishing top quality papers that help the development of interdisciplinary research and to cross the boundaries between computer science and perception. Therefore, we decided to publish a TAP special issue based on a selection of outstanding contributions to the very successful EuroHaptics 2004 meeting held in Munich. From the over 120 presentations at this meeting, we choose seven excellent contributions and we asked the authors to prepare a largely extended version of their conference paper with significant novelty value to the EuroHaptics and TAP communities. For this special issue all manuscripts were again peer reviewed. The selected manuscripts cover the whole spectrum of the meeting—from haptic hardware and engineering to touch perception and its applications. To fit within the range of interest covered by the TAP journal during the selection process for this special issue, we put particular emphasis on contributions that demonstrate a cross-fertilization of the perceptual and engineering research interests. The outcome, we believe, is a very formidable and balanced TAP special issue. This issue starts with a manuscript that has a relatively high weight on the neuroscience aspects of haptics and it ends with a manuscript that has its weight toward haptic hardware components. The first paper is by Hubert Dinse and colleagues, and it is an interesting summary and review of previous and ongoing psychophysical and brain functional experiments showing that a single-finger or a multifingers unattended simultaneous stimulation protocol (coactivation) alters haptic sensing and concurrently induces a plastic cortical reorganization in the somatosensory cortex. The second paper by Laron Walker and coworkers presents a series of experiments that formally test the observation that virtual surfaces are haptically perceived as lower in depth if they are rendered as less stiff relative to another surface. The results of …