Is It Different to Touch Oneself Than to Touch Others? A Scientific Journey with Vincent Hayward

In this article, we wish to share a scientific journey with our colleague and dear friend Vincent Hayward. The question of the extent to which it is different to touch oneself and someone else's skin brought us to many experimental studies and scientific discoveries. We present some of them here. It started with the use of a tactile device to investigate whether the reference frames specific to the hand differs depending on its position, towards or away from oneself. We then developed a technique allowing us to record skin-to-skin touch by means of an accelerator fixed at a short distance from the touching skin. We used this technique to probe specific parameters involved in skin-to-skin touch, such as speed and pressure, as well as the differences that arise in the signal when touching our own versus someone else's skin. Finally, the same methodology was used to record social touch to convey it at a distance through the auditory channel. Through this short piece we wish to show how Vincent Hayward inspired this new field of research, opening to myriads of applications.