Research

Takekazu's research teaches AI to recognize the tactile sensation of clothing — the softness, roughness, and texture you feel when you touch or wear fabric — and turns that recognition into something you can explore through language and through devices. The throughline is quantifying wearing comfort: sensing tactile qualities from real cloth, encoding them in a machine-readable latent space, and rendering them back through soft, wearable haptic interfaces, with applications spanning virtual reality, telepresence, and fashion technology.

This plays out across several systems: Telextiles, an end-to-end system for remotely transmitting the tactile sensation of cloth (UIST '23); the Pinching Tactile Display and Pinching Visuo-haptic Display line of work, which reproduces fabric texture via electrostatic adsorption and studies how visual cues reinforce it (AVI '24, ICMI '25, CHI EA '25/'26); and, to capture the tactile data these systems rely on, a motion-controlled robotic sliding system for recording tactile data directly from clothing (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025).

See the Publications page for the full list — several entries include short video demonstrations of the systems described above.