🧠 Key Realizations & Updated Thoughts
Balancing External Opinions and Personal Integrity
- Realized the tendency to absorb and react to many (sometimes contradicting) suggestions from others.
- As a Type 1 personality, reaffirmed the need to stay grounded in personal integrity while remaining open to feedback.
Current Research Direction
- Working on tactile sensing devices for robots, exploring how to connect this with the vision of enhancing mutual understanding between people.
- Acknowledged the technology’s current application is more robot-focused, while human-centered applications remain ambiguous.
Exploration of Human Needs
- Questioned whether people truly lack tactile feedback tools or if natural senses are sufficient for most.
- Aware that haptic devices have existed for decades, yet still unsure where the real human need lies.
Vision Rationale
- Belief: As human interactions become more virtual and remote, haptic devices could reintroduce physical awareness and presence.
- Idea: Transmitting physical sensation from one real-world environment to another (not VR-based).
Product Concept (with skepticism)
- Envisioned a wearable system where one person’s tactile input is felt by another.
- Compared to existing VR gaming suits, but aimed at physical-to-physical remote interaction.
- Personally skeptical of the idea’s demand, referring to it as possibly a “fake need.”
Potential Application Areas
- Disability support (e.g., for individuals with impaired physical sensation) seen as a more justifiable use case.
💬 “If I Were You” – Peer Feedback
Clarify Your Mission and Need
- Focus on identifying and articulating a clear societal or user need.
- Technology is not persuasive without a compelling problem it solves.
Explore the Disability Space
- Several answers naturally shifted toward accessibility needs.
- Suggestion to lean deeper into the disability context where haptics may truly benefit people.
Simplify Communication
- The concept of haptic display technology needs clearer, simpler explanation.
- Suggested: Frame it so people can immediately grasp what it does and why it matters.
Define Impact for Specific Populations
- Encouraged to imagine how this tech would meaningfully improve lives for distinct groups.
- Push to develop clear use cases tied to real-world benefit.
💭 Reflection
- Stronger awareness of the gap between personal vision and real-world user needs.
- Committed to exploring disability-centered use cases and improving how the idea is communicated.
- Still searching for the core mission and need that will justify and focus the work ahead.
