Fwd: From R. Kurzweil's newsletter. Gadgets get the feel
- From: dg140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Charles Pond)
- To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 12:56:31 -0400 (EDT)
* 14 July 2006
WHEN it comes to interacting with computers, our sense of touch has been
all but ignored. It's the first sense we develop in the womb, yet for
most of us rumbling games controllers or vibrating cellphones are just
about the only devices that make use of it.
That is set to change. Gadgets that stimulate our sense of touch, known
as haptic devices, were once too expensive for most people to afford.
Now the cost is coming down, and more revolutionary haptic contraptions
are just over the horizon. Cellphones could soon have a tactile
"display", for example, and portable gadgets containing a GPS device
will be able to nudge you towards your desired destination.
Haptic devices will add a new dimension to communications, entertainment
and computer control for everybody, and for people with visual
impairment they promise to transform everyday life. One proposed device
consists of a headband that imprints the shape of objects in front of it
onto the wearer's forehead, something that visually impaired people
could find a great help when navigating though a cluttered environment.
Most people's experience of haptics so far has been limited to vibrating
cellphones and games controllers for consoles such as Sony's PlayStation
2 and Microsoft's Xbox. These use a motor to spin a weight that is
mounted off-centre on a spindle. As the weight rotates, its eccentric
motion jerks the gadget around, providing a rough-and-ready vibration or
rumble.
The next big thing in computer game control, the handset for Nintendo's
forthcoming Wii console, will for the first time offer 3D-motion sensing
too. Players will be able to swing an on-screen baseball bat or tennis
racket or wield a virtual paintbrush, just by moving the controller
through the air. When it comes to haptic feedback, however, even the
Wii's controller is limited to little more than a simple shake and
rumble.
For most gamers, the first truly sophisticated haptic controller will be
the Novint Falcon, scheduled to launch next year. It got rave reviews
when it was demoed in May at the E3 computer games expo in Los Angeles.
Gamers were suddenly able to "feel" the weight and recoil of a gun and
experience the sensation of wading through water in games such as the
shoot-'em-up Half-Life 2.
The Falcon controller consists of a spherical gripper connected to a
base by three mechanical arms. As you move it around, motors in the base
apply forces to each arm to create resistance in three dimensions. This
gives the illusion of touching a solid object or the push of a moving
one.
The Falcon is a simplified version of haptic devices that already allow
computer artists to sculpt shapes in virtual clay, and give surgeons
tactile feedback as they manipulate robotic arms. While specialised
devices can cost more than $10,000, Novint says the Falcon will sell for
just $100.
Although the Falcon is a revelation for many users, researchers are
already looking ahead towards even more inventive ways of exploiting the
underutilised sense of touch. The going is expected to be tough. Part of
the problem lies in building hardware that can exploit the extraordinary
sensitivity of human skin. "The hand is exquisitely sensitive to a range
of textures," says Susan Lederman, who runs the Touch Lab at Queen's
University in Ontario, Canada. The problem with most haptic devices is
that they lack the fidelity to simulate texture, stretchiness and
smoothness, she says. "The ideas in this field have always been
inhibited by the technology available. It has not been as finessed as we
would like."
Despite this, steady progress is being made. For example, a team led by
Joseph Luk at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and
Vincent Hayward of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has developed
a sensitive "tactile display" for portable devices such as cellphones or
MP3 players. This consists of an array of about 20 electrically
activated horizontal bars each about 1 centimetre long, arranged side by
side to form a rectangle 1.5 centimetres deep. The user places a finger
on the array via a small window in one side of the device. Controlling
the voltages applied to these bars causes them to move, slightly
deforming the fingertip's surface. This deceives the brain into
believing the finger is touching a shape or texture.
The researchers say that the device can simulate several distinct shapes
and motions: bumps, holes, sharp edges and a rolling wave-like
sensation. If used in a cellphone, these sensations could be associated
with different functions. "You could have a unique feel for each menu
item," Luk suggests, so that users could change their phone's settings
without having to glance at the screen, or perhaps check whether a
particular contact has left a message. The tactile display can also be
attached to a set of sliders and moved across a flat video screen to
allow blind users to feel moving images displayed on the screen in real
time.
Other researchers are pushing the boundaries of haptic technology in
different ways. Tomohiro Amemiya and colleagues at NTT's basic research
labs in Kanagawa, Japan, have created a hand-held device that can
literally push users around. Called the Phantom-DRAWN, the device
exploits the fact that humans feel rapid acceleration more strongly than
slower acceleration. It contains two wheels, each with a weight on one
side and attached to a slider. By accelerating the two wheels' spins at
different rates and moving them along the sliders, they can produce the
sensations of movement in any direction along a particular plane.
The device will be on display later this month at the SIGGRAPH computer
conference in Boston. One version has been added to an iPod to make it
move downwards - and hence to seem heavier - as more music is added.
Another can be used to guide people remotely. Shrunk into a mobile
phone, the system could use GPS to nudge a person towards their
destination, Amemiya says. Combined with motion-sensing, it could
improve a person's golf swing or teach them to dance. "In future, I hope
all mobile devices will include the device," he adds. "I also plan to
use the device to extend the capability of visually impaired people."
Another haptic technology that could revolutionise life for people with
visual disabilities will also be on show at SIGGRAPH. The Forehead
Retina System, developed by Hiroyuki Kajimoto and colleagues at the
University of Tokyo in Japan, is worn like a headband and provides a
person with a tactile representation of what lies in front of them. The
user wears a pair of sunglasses containing a miniature video camera that
sends a video feed of a scene to a compact computer. This converts it
into a line image, which it sends to an array of 512 electrodes on the
user's forehead. In this way an outline of the scene can be transmitted
to the wearer by electrically stimulating their skin, allowing them to
"feel" what lies ahead.
Though interpreting this tactile signal to identify details of the scene
ahead is not easy, the researchers hope it will be possible to train
people to use the system just as people now learn to read Braille. A
company called EyePlusPlus, set up to market the technology, is already
testing it on blind students at the Prefectural School for the Blind in
Chiba, Japan.
Haptic technology could not only prove invaluable for such people, but
could also open up a whole new world of sensory experience to all of us.
"Some surgeons argue that touch is in fact the most important sense we
have," Lederman says. "It will be exciting to marry vision and sound
with touch sensory interfaces."
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