Looking for ideas for your haptics projects? [Destin] of the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel got a tour from the engineers at HaptX of their full-featured VR glove with amazing haptic feedback both with a very fine, 120-point sense of touch, force feedback for each finger, temperature, and motion tracking.
In hacks, we usually stimulate the sense of touch by vibrating something against the skin. With this glove, they use pneumatics to press against the skin. A single fingertip has multiple roughly 1/8 inch air bladders in contact with it. Each bladder is separately pneumatically controlled by pushing air into it. The air pressure can vary continuously so that the bladders can push lightly, harder or anywhere in between. The glove has 120 of these bladders spread out over the fingers and the palm. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow him to see the valves controlling the pneumatics, but if you are looking for a low-frequency, low-cost way to actuate valves you might consider using syringes. The engineers do tell [Destin] that if your VR scene shows something pressing against your virtual finger, as long as your haptics push against your real finger within around 1/8th of a second, your brain won’t notice the delay.
They’re also working on using hot and cold fluids to give a sense of temperature within a glove. This is demonstrated in the first video below when [Destin] feels heat while a dragon in the VR world breathes fire on his hand. Fortunately one of the engineers mentions that our sense of temperature is one of the slower ones, it can handle longer latencies than even touch. We can see implementing this in a hack using a bladder pressing against the skin while tubes circulate different temperature fluids through it. But maybe there’s a way to do it electrically, possibly with thermoelectric modules as is done with this drinks cooler? Though safety issues might prohibit that.
Other features mentioned are force feedback for each finger, and their custom motion tracking which uses both magnetic and optical means to track fingertips. But we’ll leave the rest to the videos below. The first is the technical tour and the second is the glove being used in the VR world.
Our thanks to [Hassi] for the tip.
Strange to see the censorship (blurring) on the tactor/bladder strip
Indeed, that was the worst video produced by SmarterEveryDay, ever.
:o/
This video was nothing more than an 18 minutes long add off “I know something, but I won’t tell!”, which I learned nothing from.
On the contrary, all the other Destin’s videos are outstanding and amazing. One of the finest YouTube channels out there. Fingers crossed, and let’s hope we wont see another quality channel going south.
:o)
Did we watch same video? Because pretty much everything Destin showed was easy to replicate and self explanatory to mech engineer.
It was rather sad to see those guys somehow think they are sitting on a unique IP. All they have are some first steps into tolerable form factor implementation. They didnt produce hard to replicate silicon, didnt invent new liquid composition or neural interface. They arent scientists, they are engineers implementing established research.
You don’t think making something usable in real life isn’t innovation?
E.g: In principle doing a micro-LED display is easy. In practice there have to be innovation to make it real.
One way to kill an otherwise good channel is to start including in-video ads (such as Sudible Books). 10% of this video was an ad. It makes you wonder is the entire video just a product placement piece.
One thing I will say to the editor; those videos should be the other way around. ;-)
But getting back on topic; VR has come a *long* way in 25 years.
I can recall many moons ago, around 1994 or so, trying out a VR demo here in Brisbane. The headset was a helmet that was as heavy as flipping lead! It did not sit well on my 10-year old head. The graphics? Well… they sort of looked like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
… and the controller was basically was a gun. The VR technology today is mindblowing by comparison.
Wonderful idea: Make a force feedback vest covered in rods similar to a dot matrix printer.. play counterstrike.. die.. Oh well, back to the drawing board
For the finger force feed back:
https://hackaday.com/2015/12/15/feeling-force-through-a-servo/
Still have plans to use this for arm/hand extensions in a werewolf costume…
Wonder if a Electrorheological fluid would have been better than pneumatics?