EIC Editorial

In 2009 IEEE Transactions on Haptics (ToH) published twenty-three papers covering a wide range of topics in haptics, including psychophysics, modeling, control, device design, and applications. Of particular note, our first special issue was published: Ambient Haptic Systems, guest-edited by Kanav Kahol, Vincent Hayward, and Stephen Brewster. They selected an excellent set of papers for the issue, covering contemporary issues such as the design of affective haptic interfaces and multi-modal interfaces. The third quarter of 2010 will bring another special issue, this one of a different variety. Entitled World Haptics Spotlight, it will be guest-edited by Lynette Jones, Matthias Harders, and Yasuyoshi Yokokohji, who served as the Conference Editorial Board for World Haptics 2009. All of the papers in the Spotlight issue were presented in an early form at that meeting. This seems like an opportune time to remind our diverse readership that ToH subscribes to an evolutionary model of publishing. We are pleased to accept a submission where some portion of it was published as a conference paper or abstract. At the same time, we insist that any ToH paper make a significant new contribution to the haptics literature. It is not sufficient for a ToH paper to be the archival version of some earlier publication.