The question of introducing more multimodal haptic feedback into consumer products is becoming crucial today, with the advent of a society increasingly focused on digital solutions. Paradoxically, devices are now accessible to more people, but a segment of the population is  excluded from these digital developments: elderly individuals who struggle to use touch screens, and visually-or auditory-impaired individuals. Indeed, computers and other devices provide information to users almost exclusively through visual and auditory feedback. How information conveyed by the different senses can integrate into a unified multisensory experience has been studied extensively. The brain integrates these inputs to reinforce information, especially when sensory signals become less reliable. Most of the studies on tactile-visual and tactile-auditory integration have been achieved in passive conditions, i.e. in conditions where the sensory inputs are not generated by active finger interactions with the environment. But recent advances in haptic surfaces offer now the possibility to study the cross-modal interaction with regard to body engagement, thus offering new perspectives for integrating multimodal haptic feedback.
The goal of this workshop is to present the state of the art in the field of multimodal touch devices, through a series of talks by experts. We will cover topics tied to Neuroscience, Psychophysics, Human Computer Interaction and Engineering.