I encountered Tekscan and had the feeling of an engineer's dream come true. Working with granular materials and soil-structure interaction, on encounters problems with large stress variations. My observations in a journal paper published by ASTM in 1997 continue to hold: "The ability of the grid-based tactile pressure sensor's system to provide real-time normal stress distribution over an area is unmatched by any other known technique. This ability provides us with an insight into the behavior and mechanisms of geomaterials that could not have been imagined previously."