Forum Discussion
Haptic: A Potential Solution
Hello,
After watching Michael Abrash's OC2 keynote, my mind has been endlessly imagining solutions to these haptic problems both in the short and long term. I wanted to present these ideas in case they might be useful.
TOUCH
In short, my solution to touch would involve 2 mechanics: soft touch and hard touch.
Now the absolute/perfect solution to touch is none other than direct neural stimulation but that is far into the future right now. We know that the short term will require some actual object to interface with. But props, morphing material, wind, and other clunky devices simply won't be streamlined enough to hit a consumer market. There's too much setup involved and don't account for freedom of movement/walking. I believe the simplest we can get right now, as far as setup, is something like a body suit.
Benefits:
Just like Oculus Touch would be an accessory for certain game types, so too, people can buy different sizes of jump suits to fit their body type if they wanna go hardcore into immersion. Now as for the actual nature of this suit. Rather than using external forces, the suit generates pressure from itself using a sort of body-to-suit isometrics duality.
SOFT TOUCH:
For soft touch, the suit will have hundreds of rings inside the fabric, and each of these rings will be made of a material that can contract when given an electric current. So for example, if you reach your fingers out to touch another person's hand, where your hand meets theirs, the rings would contract at 360 degrees around your fingers and cause you to feel the pressure. All of these rings would each have a very thin wire which signals on/off, and all these wires would come together someplace such as your lower back where you'd have a light battery pack.
HARD TOUCH:
For hard touch, the suit itself will have another set of stands running parallel to the rings. These strands would be able to change from a flexible to a rigid shape (perhaps chemically). So for example, your hand is reaching out to touch a wall in VR, and upon contact, the strands in your arm will harden so that you can't continue extending your elbow toward the wall. In essence, it stops you by using your own body, rather than outside forces. It works as a sort of anti-muscular-system that is positioned at all of your joints.
At the same time you'd have the soft-touch rings contracting at your fingertips, making it feel like you really have touched a wall.
This approach would take researching into materials, elasticity, chemicals, and the like, but I think it can be done within the next few years. If an electric current can make an elastic material more rigid, then we have all the pieces we need for this solution.
What do you guys think?
After watching Michael Abrash's OC2 keynote, my mind has been endlessly imagining solutions to these haptic problems both in the short and long term. I wanted to present these ideas in case they might be useful.
TOUCH
In short, my solution to touch would involve 2 mechanics: soft touch and hard touch.
- Soft Touch: Would be the ability to feel someone passing their finger along your forearm, or placing their palm gently on your chest.
- Hard Touch: Would be the ability to prevent your hand from slipping through a wall/table or solid object in VR. In other words, significant force applied against you.
Now the absolute/perfect solution to touch is none other than direct neural stimulation but that is far into the future right now. We know that the short term will require some actual object to interface with. But props, morphing material, wind, and other clunky devices simply won't be streamlined enough to hit a consumer market. There's too much setup involved and don't account for freedom of movement/walking. I believe the simplest we can get right now, as far as setup, is something like a body suit.
Benefits:
- No tethering (complete freedom of movement)
- Lightweight
- Ease of use (just put it on)
Just like Oculus Touch would be an accessory for certain game types, so too, people can buy different sizes of jump suits to fit their body type if they wanna go hardcore into immersion. Now as for the actual nature of this suit. Rather than using external forces, the suit generates pressure from itself using a sort of body-to-suit isometrics duality.
SOFT TOUCH:
For soft touch, the suit will have hundreds of rings inside the fabric, and each of these rings will be made of a material that can contract when given an electric current. So for example, if you reach your fingers out to touch another person's hand, where your hand meets theirs, the rings would contract at 360 degrees around your fingers and cause you to feel the pressure. All of these rings would each have a very thin wire which signals on/off, and all these wires would come together someplace such as your lower back where you'd have a light battery pack.
HARD TOUCH:
For hard touch, the suit itself will have another set of stands running parallel to the rings. These strands would be able to change from a flexible to a rigid shape (perhaps chemically). So for example, your hand is reaching out to touch a wall in VR, and upon contact, the strands in your arm will harden so that you can't continue extending your elbow toward the wall. In essence, it stops you by using your own body, rather than outside forces. It works as a sort of anti-muscular-system that is positioned at all of your joints.
At the same time you'd have the soft-touch rings contracting at your fingertips, making it feel like you really have touched a wall.
This approach would take researching into materials, elasticity, chemicals, and the like, but I think it can be done within the next few years. If an electric current can make an elastic material more rigid, then we have all the pieces we need for this solution.
What do you guys think?
11 Replies
- I think it's some great thoughts!
I did a project involving the microcontrol of Nitinol wire which contracts by ~5% when heated (it needs a smaller restoring force to restretch it). Very thin wires were actuated, eight individual wires were heated via PWM from a single darlington driver chip. the eight wires drove a very small 4 DOF robot arm, complimetary pull/pull wires for each joint.
I can certainly see it working for the soft touch, the problem of one size fits all would require some elastic to be in the loop, indeed without it any annular wires would constrict blood flow in fingers/limbs, even when driven by fractions of a Watt.
The idea of distracting the mind with a soft touch when locking a limb to simulate hard touch sounds very interesting.
For the soft touch, maybe not just annular wires but also pinching wires; like tiny stars or crosses woven into the fabric, when actuated they would cause the surrounding fabric to draw in, and if the interior of the suit were friction bound to the skin, then the skin would follow.
For a hi res suit the addressing logic could be perhaps distributed throughout the suit on some kind of serial bus woven right in using small chips or microboards.
Speaking of resolution, the skin has diffrerent spatial resolutions depending on area, like this:
- Nice, I wish I could do experiments like that..
Yeah, thin wires would definitely be needed to increase the resolution of the touch. Since the hands have more nerve endings, they can have a higher concentration of wires than other parts.
I like the pinching idea, although I wonder how that would affect the function of the annular pull. Actually, come to think of it... it's possible that the annular wires could just be replaced for pinching crosses altogether. The downside of the rings is that you feel the pressure all around the circumference, but if we had something more like a grid of tons of crosses, then we could more selectively target the position of the sensation. Brilliant suggestion!
As for fit/stretch..
If the wires aren't solid metal, then we might have more elasticity. Are there non-rigid materials that are conductive? I have to do more research...
But if that can't be done, the size of the suit would need to be pretty precise. I have a hunch that Oculus Rift 2 will have that body-scanning technology that's already in the works, and with that it may be possible to scan your precise body and have a suit mailed to you at just the right fit. :)
Making sure the suit doesn't overheat from the electricity is also something to overcome. In fact... all of these things depend heavily on constructing the perfect, elastic, conductive, low-heat-rate, constricting material. :? That's quite an order. Is there anything currently out there that does all this? - RE flexy conductors: Very thin stainless steel could probably be stiched in a small zigzag pattern into a stretchy fabric like lycra. My wife has a sewing machine that has zig zag option for this purpose (stretchy fabric) although I've never tried with anything other than regular cotton.
Yes experiments are needed, you can experiment with nitinol wire quite cheaply, can use 1.5v cells to actuate a short length of wire, the current requirement on thin wire is small so you could provide variable current using a cheap potentiometer.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NITINOL-SUPER-E ... 4ad863bd0f
I was thinking some more about the problem of hard touch last night, of course a full body suit as you have envisaged would be the holy grail, but for the case of exploring the environment with just an index finger tip this might work:
Place a long flexible silicon thimble on index finger, the very tip of it has a rigid nylon dome.
The rigid nylon dome is connected via non elastic thread to a small winch wheel on the shoulder which is controlled by a very responsive stepper motor which incorporates a torque sensor.
In idle mode ( when not touching virtual object ), the winch would simply let out and take in thread to remove all slack in the system while exerting almost no pull on the thimble. Kind of like a wheel on a clock spring but because it's active the back pressure could be almost zero.
When the index finger position intersects with a virtual wall the necessary back pressure can be applied.
Provided the winch wheel were anchored to a shoulder harness with a good spread then the pulling force on the shoulder should be non noticeable to brain when compared to the pushing force applied to the finger. It's actually a pulling force but perceived as pushing due to front thimble dome. - I like this idea, though to comment on the point you made about "direct neural stimulation" That specifically we might be far from, however. If brain signals could be read translating thoughts for motion and if you could temporarily paralyze the body then you could achieve similar results. Though of course that comes with all sorts of problems of its own that would need to be worked out. However it's definitely possible.
- @Madaras - yes, I hope we get there. We'd have to stimulate the brain region, which g4c posted above, responsible for the body. But we'd have to be extremely precise in it.
I just came across something interesting today. Watching a TED talk on bionics, apparently a material does exist that fits the description of "hard touch". In this video at 7:08 we start to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsNZJTWw0w&t=7m8s
It goes from flexible to stiff as a board with an electric current. And it's apparently strong enough to be used for limb movement. That's just the type of strength needed to provide an anti-force to the force of our body for that haptic feedback. - Whoa, that ted talk was incredible, Hugh Herr is a brilliant engineer!
The stiffening material at 7:08 indeed looks interesting for the hard touch problem. - Do any of the Oculus haptics researchers (Abrash's team) take a look at these forum threads? Or is there any way to run this idea by them?
- Yes Oculus does look at these threads regularly. That's why they made the "Developers" forum.
- A, great! :D Yeah, fail moment.
I just didn't know if maybe they're super busy with everything else they have on their hands. - Some very cool ideas in this thread :) I especially like the idea of a stiffening material to stop your limbs, although I would fear the possible bugs that it could result in - getting physically stuck does not sound nice!
Have you seen the Tesla suit? They say that it actually uses eletrical impulses to stimulate directly. There's no apparent solution to the "hard touch" problem though.
(also, shameless plug: our Salto suit is a mocap full-body suit that, (as you say in your first post about body suits), has almost non-existent setup time. We're not looking into haptic feedback right now though)
