Alternance:HapticsSignalEncoding

Alternance: Sensing signal encoding InterDigital is looking for a student to join its team of researchers and engineers working on extending current research on haptics to more broad sensing technologies. The candidate will join the Interactive Media team to work on haptics & sensing encoding in a standardization context. The position will consist in studying the state of the art in sensing signal compression and propose new methods to improve current encoding standards. Part of the job will also consist in developing proof of concepts and demos to tests new solutions. Context The recent democratization of virtual reality has strongly re-invigorated the research and development on haptic technologies. This growing interest in the haptic community resulted in the release of numerous haptic products, including new consumer devices, authoring tools and plenty of haptic enabled VR experiences. However, this wide range of available haptic devices and haptic tools gave birth to a multitude of proprietary formats which make interoperability problematic. This slows down market adoption and raises the need for providing standardized formats and methods to encode and decode haptic signals. To address this limitation, two major standard organizations are currently working on coded representations of haptic data. Interdigital is especially involved in the standardization process of haptics through the ISO/IEC MPEG-I standard. This standard provides a first base for encoding both PCM and parametric signals for a variety of haptic modalities (vibrotactile, temperature, force, electrotactile, …). Haptics can be seen as one of the different sensing technologies, therefore InterDigital is currently looking at extending the concepts proposed and studied during the MPEG Haptics work for sensing at large. The concepts of graph and parametric signals can certainly be adapted to other sensing modalities. Main Goal The goal of the position will be to review existing sensing technologies (