If you’ve been keeping your skills fresh with any console video games in the last 15 years (or you’ve acquired a smartphone), you’ll know that “rumble,” or “haptic” feedback plays a key role in augmenting our onscreen (or touch-screen typing) experience. Nevertheless, this sort of rumble feedback is surprisingly boolean, and hasn’t developed into a richer level of precision since it started to be introduced in gaming over 30 years ago. In response, [Martin] and his fellow design teammates at the University of Salzburg, Austria have introduced the TorqueScreen, a mobile haptic attachment that puts a twist on conventional force feedback.
At its core the TorqueScreen is a gyroscope attached to a servo with the respective rotational axes in a perpendicular alignment. When the servo rotates the live gyroscope, the user can sense the tablet’s resistance to rotate about the servos axis.
The team’s conference demonstration model features a brushless motor plucked from an old hard drive controlled by an Arduino and driven manually by a Wii nunchuck. Currently only one rotational axis resists changes in rotation, but a gimbal may be the next step in this project.
We’ve certainly seen budget handheld haptic devices before, but this project allows for an entire spread of responses proportional to the speed at which the gyroscope is rotated about the servo axis.
Unless you’re reading this post on your already-torquescreen-enabled mobile device, it’s a bit difficult to get a feel for what kind of interactions you can produce with this setup. The video (after the break), though, can give you a pretty good idea of what kind of interactivity you’d expect with device clipped onto your tablet.
[via the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction Conference]
A gyroscopic unstabilizer used to unbalance (contrary to antenna and camera platforms and self-balancing robots). Interesting approach but the demonstration shown in the video is uninspired.
Wow you made a reaction wheel… A very tiny reaction wheel. This is how some space craft control orientation.
Are you just not impressed or something? it’s a really nice little device.
Or more specifically, a control moment gyro.
I’d love to see a game controller integrate three CMG’s and vibration based virtual force actuators like http://lab.rekimoto.org/projects/traxion/ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1PHtzGeXrg or http://tacticalhaptics.com/products/
3 axes: http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/Research_DAndrea/Cubli/Cubli_ECC2013.pdf
Was about to post the same XD
Grab a spinning hard disk and move it around. You’ll notice the gyro forces. Feels really strange.
Yes, of course, that is why had to develop ultra thin screens! So that we can glue unwieldy big gyro mechanisms to the back. Finally we have something that mechanically rotates for our tables, at last…..
Aquatic ROV drivers need this so badly. Being able to “feel” currents and tether forces and the inertia of the ROV itself, and notice when something’s out of place, could avoid a lot of snags and mishaps, not to mention shaving precious time off missions.