The human sensory system can distinguish differences between thousands of different textures in the real world, from different grades of silk quality or grains of wood to glass, metals, "expensive feeling finishes" on our high-end consumer goods and more.

When we are trying to design different-feeling textures for our haptic displays, however, we find that many textures that look different might feel the same. This is particularly true if our display cannot render cues such as temperature or material compliance.

We are investigating naturally-inspired methods of generating different texture patterns, including reaction-diffusion patterns, to determine the visual and haptic design spaces for a particular generation method.