Communications between human beings have come down to us from 'Body Language' and been reformed in cyberspace. Letters and speeches can be delivered through computers and networks perfectly. Furthermore the webcam can show facial images to each other on conversation. But communications including touch feelings can not yet be transmitted well on conversation.
The communication including haptic feelings is the need of the times in cultural and social aspects. Communication has two demands. The first demand is to extend the territory of information for contacting with remote friends. And the second is to increase the modality of information for sharing rich emotions. At this point, communication with haptics is so intuitive and direct that can enrich feelings.
In this paper, 'Haptic Primitive' is proposed to provide the basic element of haptic communication. To help people to use haptic in communication, the study should be approached in the technical method and in the cultural aspect at the same time.
In the technical approach, firstly haptic environment should be designed with understanding the complex process of human feelings. And the simple data structure and modeling methods which can express and transfer various sensations should be developed for general people to use haptic environment easily. For the goal, the new tree structure composed of primitives is used for the simple and easy data structure which can increase the modality. It can be transferred so fast that realize the haptic communication. The concept of Constructive Solid Geometry model is also used for the modeling method. It can help for users to understand the structure of haptic scene and designing their own scene.
In cultural and social approach, the haptic primitive should be considered with the general user's needs, especially the kinds of touch sensation. So the possibility of the blending with typical human-computer-human communication [computer mediated communication] was surveyed. And the cultural effects and social models of communication with haptic information were also suggested.
The proposed haptic primitive can extend our communications for including haptic feedbacks easily. Therefore it can play a key role to make the communication with haptic information in virtual reality.
