Using Haptic Technology for Education in Chemistry

In recent years the field of haptic and gesture studies is expanding and improvements are being made by developing, testing and refining devices along with software to give a sense of touch or to use gestures to interact and "feel" three dimensional virtual objects. Such technologies have a significant role to play in education. The uses of modern devices based on gesture or haptic technologies and their applications in chemistry education, for example, may provide a platform to the students to better comprehend ideas about several chemical subjects. This paper covers the fundamentals of such technologies, studies a few commonly used devices, and concludes with the current use in education. A brief description of an educational gesture-based system for chemistry experiment simulations and molecular visualization is presented in this paper. It also describes some didactic scenarios and discusses current results and future works.