The multidisciplinary international haptics research community has enjoyed a healthy and steady growth in recent years. In 2006 the time was ripe to bring the haptics research community closer together to debate challenges and opportunities in haptics, and to make concerted efforts towards experimental, theoretical, and algorithmic breakthroughs in our growing field. Therefore, the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics (TCH) was founded under the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the Computer Society in 2006 and 2007, respectively.