Haptics Helix Event - Emerging Technologies for Social Interaction

Our sense of touch enables us to understand our environment but also serves emotional purposes. For example, it provides information (surfaces, textures), it warns us (heat, thorns), it soothes and bonds us (caressing, hugging). Yet, current online and digital interactions make limited use of our sense of touch, often because most haptic technologies require us to wear or hold something, while their capacity to deliver rich tactile sensations is limited compared to how we naturally apply our touch sense in our offline physical and social interactions.

This Haptics Helix event is aimed at anyone interested in Emerging Technologies for Social Interaction and participating in proposals targeting one of the forthcoming Horizon Europe CL4 topics.

This Haptics Helix event is organised by the TOUCHLESS project with close collaboration with all projects conforming the SECTG cluster.

Agenda

10:00 – 10:05 – Welcome address
10:05 – 10:20 – Introduction to EU Touchless project
10:20 – 10:30 – EIC Instrument with a focus on targeting the Pathfinder Transition call

Nadege Grabowski, Team Leader, Zaz Ventures, Pathfinder Helix Leader

10:30 – 10:40 – Q&A
10:40 – 11:00 – Exploitation at the European level (Inlecom)

Mark Bennett, Senior Innovation and Commercialisation Consultant, Inlecom Commercial Pathways

11:00 – 11:20 – Elevator Pitch Session
11:20 – 11:35 – Break
11:35 – 12:20 – Panel discussions: Novel technologies at the intersection of AI and social interaction
12:20 – 12:35 – Specialist talk TBC
12:35 – 12:45 – The Haptics Helix

Michael Browne, CEO, Crowdhelix

12:45 – 13:00 – VR and social interaction

Mel Slater, Investigator, University of Barcelona

13:00 – Closing remarks