Interactive Haptic Interfaces: From Tactile Sensing to Integrated Feedback Systems

ABSTRACT

The rapid emergence of physical artificial intelligence is accelerating the convergence of humans, robots, and virtual environments, creating demand for interactive haptic interfaces that enable natural bidirectional tactile communication. Although conventional haptic systems rely on rigid and bulky hardware, recent advances in soft functional materials and structural engineering have enabled the development of lightweight, flexible, and skin‐conformable devices with enhanced tactile fidelity and user comfort. This review presents an interaction‐oriented framework for haptic interfaces by categorizing representative interaction scenarios according to the functional roles of tactile sensing and haptic feedback, encompassing virtual‐to‐human, human‐to‐virtual, human‐to‐robot, robot‐to‐human, and human‐to‐human interactions. Representative tactile sensing and haptic feedback technologies are systematically discussed, along with multimodal sensing and actuation, signal translation, efficient data processing, and machine learning‐assisted abstraction, to illustrate how raw biomechanical information is transformed into meaningful tactile communication. Other challenges, including standardized evaluation protocols, spatiotemporal performance tradeoffs, power management, thermal safety, modality mismatch, and system‐level integration, are critically analyzed. Finally, future perspectives on intelligent and adaptive haptic systems are discussed, highlighting the importance of perceptually consistent, low‐latency, and responsive tactile communication. This review provides a comprehensive roadmap for next‐generation human–machine integration that seamlessly bridges physical and virtual environments.