You've most likely felt the vibrations of a phone in your pocket, but did you know that the buzzing effect is one of the most basic forms of a field known as Haptics?
Haptics refers to any interaction involving touch, or specifically touch feedback.
What if vibrations could communicate more to you than just the arrival of a text or phone call? What if touch was the only sense you had?
The haptics field is wide open, and researchers are finding new and exciting ways to communicate and experience both the real world and the virtual world.
In this episode, we look at one haptics application right out of science-fiction — a full-body HoloSuit! — and several smaller-sized ideas that could help people right here and right now.
Listen to the episode below.
Episode highlights include:
- Yon Visell, a professor at the University of California — Santa Barbara, provides an overview of Haptics. Visell spoke with Tech Briefs about his work at the school's RE Touch Lab.
- The HoloSuit from KaayaTech allows you to fully enter virtual reality from head to toe. HoloSuit CEO Harsha Kikkeri takes us through the suit’s 36 total sensors, 9 haptic feedback devices, and 6 input buttons.
- Tommy Sullivan, an electronics and software engineer, has plenty of ideas. One his best: Radar glasses that can help the visually impaired detect obstacles. Anyone can make them, too; Tommy laid out the steps in full detail on instructables.com.
- Along with MIT’s Charlotte Reed, Purdue Professor Hong Tan set out to create some buzz – specifically a way of receiving messages via vibrations through the skin on the forearm. Read Hong’s interview with Tech Briefs.
Watch how the Holosuit from Kaaya Tech captures your entire body motion and transfers it to an avatar or robot in real-time.
Watch an animation from Hong Tan, of the haptic symbols for 15 English vowel sounds.
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Transcript
00:00:14 Introducing HoloSuit which virtualizes your entire body and allows you to interact with the 3d spaces around you naturally by touching the nearby objects pointing to the far away objects and feeling those objects through the haptic feedback similar to how capacitive touch changed the way you interacted with the 2d screens hollow suit will cause a paradigm change in the way you interact with the 3d spaces HoloSuit captures your entire body motion including fingers head and foot and can transfer it to an avatar or robot in real-time this allows humans to operate humanoid robots leveraging the same tools which are built for humans in firefighting nuclear disaster hostage rescue situations hollow suit replaces expensive physical simulators for
00:01:02 defense equipment like submarine fighter jets with virtual training environments where you can get trained either through hollow suit AI or by remote reel trainers wearing hollow suit who are sharing the same virtual space this allows your body's muscle memory to be fully trained by operating in the same physical space and getting real-time feedback for virtual interactions through half technique siders hollow suit comes with options for 26 or 36 embedded sensors and 9 haptic exciters distributed across both arms legs and all 10 fingers combined with six embedded buttons you can combine hollow suit body motion with facial tracking features of smartphone and create full-fledged animations
00:01:54 hello soup can capture your body motion with incredible precision even play piano with it and capture every note holo soup allows you to pick up scale reorient musical instruments in virtual world to create and play your own virtual orchestra hollow soup golf can train you in the virtual world and record your motion in the real golf course you can even share this full 360 recording with your coach who can play pause rewind zoom change camera angles and get full body analytics of your golf drives we are working with former India national cricket team coach to virtualize cricket coaching holo soup yoga is a cross-platform app which allows the trainer or student to store various yoga poses the student can then play back these poses and follow them
00:02:45 while wearing the holo suit if there is any mistake in the pose haptic exciters closest to the discrepancy will vibrate gently guiding the student back to the correct pose without even needing the display sports fitness trainers can even observe and correct the student as she is doing the pose in the same virtual space by interacting with their avatars through haptic exciters we are working with tent dawn of karate in Okinawa who virtualized holo suit karate training HoloSuit is already getting deployed for upskilling of factory workers and training of defense personnel on latest equipment hallo suit is being embraced by indian defense for a virtual training of paramedic personnel for disaster response training scenarios the training can be done in mixed reality where the
00:03:34 trainees movement in real world is translated to virtual world or virtual reality where buttons can be used to simulate movement multiple personnel can be trained simultaneously where they share the same virtual space in hallo world we hope you're as excited as we are regarding the potential of policy to change the way we interact with 3d spaces not only for sports and fitness but also for education entertainment and for rehabilitating people with disabilities are enjoy looking forward for your support to bring hallo suit to real and virtual worlds thank you you
