Shultz receives prestigious TCH Early Career Award

The TCH Early Career Award is given by the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society’s Technical Committee for Haptics to just one recipient every two years, with the purpose of recognizing “outstanding contributions to the area of haptics by members of our community who are in the earlier stages of their career.” In 2025, the honor has gone to Craig Shultz, an assistant professor in electrical & computer engineering who joined the U. of I. just last year.

Haptics is a young but rapidly growing field whose main idea, as Shultz put it, is to “build interfaces for your hands and fingers and anything that specifically has tactile feedback.”

Shultz explained that the haptic devices currently in use generally fall at two extremes: either they’re “really big robots” used in industry or for niche applications like surgery, or they’re rudimentary, like the vibration motors that make smartphones buzz to get users’ attention.

“So there’s this huge gap in between those two,” he said. “And that’s where I operate.”

As a Ph.D. student, Shultz concentrated on integrating haptic feedback into touchscreens, pursuing technologies known as “surface haptics” because they’re based in a 2D plane. For example, he started working on making keyboard-key–like projections that can rise up out of a touchscreen’s surface (see adjoining video). More recently, his main focus has shifted towards augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other wearables—applications that involve 3D “spatial haptics.”

The difference between 2D and 3D haptics is enormous, as 3D haptics requires tracking of, for example, a hand’s movement through space. “I’ve been thinking really deeply about how we integrate haptics with those types of [AR/VR] device,” Shultz said. “My approach is to think of haptic devices more as visual displays and less like speakers, which is traditionally how people think of haptics. Like your vibration motor in your phone is sort of like a speaker, right? There’s one of them, and it makes these global vibrations. But I think that if we can get more content and more information and richer interactions with these haptic devices, that will make them ultimately more useful.”

He said that one important possible application would be teleoperation of robots, such that a robot has tactile “skin” on its hand, and a human operator wears a glove containing tactile actuators to which information on what the robot is touching is transmitted. So, he said, the human would be “feeling what the robot feels and... moving the robot hand in this teleoperated sense.”

In technical terms, Shultz said that the current main goals of his research group are to develop novel actuation mechanisms that generate spatially distributed mechanical energy, and to create perceptually grounded models and rendering algorithms to drive those mechanisms.

Shultz was previously the VP of Research and Development for a haptic start-up called Tanvas, for which he worked on cars’ touchscreens for use by companies like BMW and Audi. Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of a Chicago-based start-up called Fluid Reality, which is building the core technologies for the kind of gloves described above.

He has a hunch that his history of working on start-ups, and with commercial partners as well as academic partners, is one reason he was selected for the TCH award; he suspects the reviewers felt that his industry involvement will lead to real-world impact. Indeed, he has been working closely with colleagues at large consumer electronics companies like Google, and he just received a Sony Faculty Innovation Award grant to develop a wearable device that will fit on a user’s fingertip.

Shultz expressed gratitude for the TCH award, which was presented to him in July at the 2025 IEEE World Haptics Conference. “It did mean a lot that the haptics community... was recognizing that they appreciated and thought my work was very impactful,” he said.

Affiliations

In addition to his primary appointment in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Shultz has affiliate appointments in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering, the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and the Siebel Center for Design.