Recent investigation in haptic man-robot interaction suggests that there are ultimately only two topical tactile feedback generation modalities for haptic human interfaces. These allow the human operator to handle either (i) temporary virtual reality-based material replicas of the local geometric and/or force profile at the contact areas of an unlimited set of generic objects that could virtually be handled during the manipulation, or (ii) permanent material replicas of a limited set of typical objects. In this paper, the two modalities are analyzed and examples of tactile human interfaces developed by the authors for telerobotic blind tactile exploration of objects, and for telerobotic hapto-visual stylus-style tool manipulation are presented to illustrate the proposed approaches. The necessary modelling of the elastic properties of 3D objects from experimental tactile and range imaging data is also presented using a neural network architecture that becomes an important component of the haptic interface.