Getting in touch with a cognitive character

We provide computer-animated characters with haptic interaction, allowing human users to interfere with cognitive characters. Our work presents an interface between control and animation of virtual characters (CONTACT) and HapTEK, a framework for haptic interaction of a human hand with virtual reality (VR). This way, human-computer interaction becomes truly bidirectional, i.e. an animated character directly provides feedback to a human user, and vice versa, introducing a new quality with respect to the behavior of both. Our system for the first time offers the opportunity for human and artificial intelligence to get in touch.