In the past few months I have been branching out a bit and have been pondering new ways of applying haptic technology. Inspired by the work we do at Digital Society School on green cities (see, for example, urban nature), I started thinking about the application of haptic technology to plants. Now bear with me, plants actually have rather sophisticated ways of detecting mechanical stimuli (i.e., ‘touch’). For one example, think of the Venus Flytrap’s ability to detect and trap prey. What is more, touch affects how plants grow thus we could potentially use haptic technology to modulate plant growth, say, in indoor farming applications.
To stimulate the haptics community to consider plants as an application area for haptic technology, I dove into literature in the biological sciences and wrote a brief review paper that outlines how plants respond to touch and how we could capitalize on this ability. The paper was recently accepted to be published in the proceedings of Eurohaptics ’20 which, hopefully, will be organized in Leiden (NL) later this year.
You can download the preprint of the paper here.
