Seoul National University's Department of Mechanical Engineering Professor Seung Hwan Ko's research 'electronic skin that can reproduce hot and cold sensations in virtual reality' was selected ase of the 100 national R&D excellence achievements in 2021 hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT.
Professor Seung Hwan Ko's research team has developed an electronic skin that realizes real-life hot and cold sensations in VR through the ERC project and the Gi Jin-won project for middle-level researchers who are receiving research funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF). Since the currently commercialized virtual reality device mainly depends sight and hearing, various information about the tactile sense that recognizes roughness, hardness, pressure, temperature, etc. is inevitably missed. Although human skin has an excellent ability to sense information about objects withly a momentary touch, virtual reality research tactile sensation has not been actively conducted, making it difficult to vividly convey the feeling of touching real objects in virtual reality. Therefore, the research team paid attention to the thermal sensation among the tactile senses, and developed a thermal haptic electronic skin that can freely realize the temperature of the contacted object surface in virtual reality.
The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Planning and Evaluation selected and announced the '2021 National Research and Development Excellence Top 100'. This year, out of about 70,000 R&D projects (as of 2020) conducted by government-funded ministries, a total of 852 candidate outcomes recommended by each ministry, department, and agency were selected. After the quality excellence was evaluated by the Excellence Performance Selection and Evaluation Committee composed of experts, the final 100 cases of excellence were selected through public verification. The fields include machinery/materials 18 cases, life/marine 26 cases, energy/environment 18 cases, information/electronics 19 cases, convergence 10 cases, and pure basics/infrastructure (infrastructure) 9 cases.
The 100 achievements selected this time are awarded with a certificates and signboards from the Minister of Science and ICT and will be added in projects and institutional evaluations according to related regulations, and the selected researchers will be highly recommended as candidates for the National R&D Performance Award (Hun, Packaging, Presidential Citation, Prime Minister's Citation, etc.). In particular, from this year, an e-book (a book of cases of national research and development excellence in '21) will be produced and provided free of charge through majorline bookstores so that the general public can more easily access the main contents of each of the top 100 research achievements.

Notice from Ministry of Science and ICT
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