Virtual Touch Toolkit: My Body in Your Hands

Virtual Touch Toolkit: My Body in Your Hands Not all touch is pleasant with both individual and cultural differences in how affective touch is perceived How we feel about touch depends on “who” is touching me, “where” and "why". For a more nuanced understanding of affective touch, we have created a Virtual Touch Toolkit (Najm et al., 2022). This novel digital touch tool allows for ecological testing which is particularly useful within the context of touch which is a personal and often intimate experience. With it we can more specifically test context driven effects: who, where, when and what will determine how we feel about touch . The tool captures both how we like to be touched but also how we use our sense of touch. The following data is from several instances of using the "My body in your hands" exercise including large citizen science projects as well as a User experience study in which all of the touch exercises were sampled. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2050/1 – Project ID 390696704 – Cluster of Excellence “Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop” (CeTI) of Technische Universität Dresden.