Haptic devices allow users to feel their interfaces and interactions. This has the potential to radically change the way we use computers. Haptic interaction is interaction related to the sense of touch. This could be based on force-feedback or tactile devices. We can take advantage of our powerful sense of touch as an alternative mechanism to send and receive information in computer interfaces. Haptic technology is now maturing and coming out of research laboratories and into real products and applications. We can therefore begin to focus on its application and general principles for its use rather than just the hardware and technology itself. Important questions are: what are haptics good for? What kind of information can be successfully presented via touch? Do haptics actually improve efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction? Arbitrary combinations of information presented to different senses have been shown to be ineffective so how should sight, hearing, and touch be combined in truly multimodal interfaces? We do not want to end up with haptic interfaces that are in fact harder to use than standard ones. Haptics may become just a gimmick for computer games, rather than the key improvement in interaction technology we believe it should be. We felt that it was therefore time to concentrate on haptic human computer interaction.

There are other conferences that discuss haptic hardware, but so far there has been little discussion of how haptics can be effectively used to improve the usability of human-computer interactions. There is currently no unified place to present research on general haptic human-computer interaction and so one aim of the workshop was to provide an information resource for those interested in the topic. Because this was the first workshop in the area and we wanted to ensure that we covered a wide range of the ongoing research, we planned to accept work on any aspect of haptic HCI. As it happened we had a very healthy turnout of 35 submissions and after a reviewing process, where each submission was reviewed by two reviewers, this resulted in 17 papers and 5 posters. The workshop took place at the University of Glasgow, UK from the 31st August to 1st September, 2000. We had over 75 attendees from Europe, the USA, and Japan.