There have been lots of haptic vest devices over the years, though the vast majority have been very simple. Many existing suits pack in a few speakers or vibration motors to give feedback to the wearer. Kinethreads aims to go further, serving as a full-body haptic suit using an innovative mechanical setup.
Kinethreads is effectively an exosuit, which mounts several motorized pulley systems to the wearer’s body. These pulleys are attached to the user’s hands, feet, back, torso, and head via strings. By winding in the pulleys, it’s possible for the device to effectively tug on different parts of the body, creating rich, dynamic physical feedback that can easily be felt and interpreted by the user. The whole system weighs 4.6 kilograms—not light, but very practical. It can also run for 6 hours on a single charge. The whole suit can be donned or doffed in under a minute. Cost is stated to be under $500.
It’s a particularly interesting device for VR use. The team notes applications such as simulating the weight of picking up a virtual object, creating the feeling of virtual “gravity,” or giving continuous dynamic feedback during a driving simulation. Other demos include mimicking the sensation of touching hard objects, or the more diffuse feeling of standing under a waterfall.
As virtual worlds become a bigger part of our daily lives, expect ever more developments in these kinds of exosuit feedback systems. We’ve seen other great work in this space before, too. Video after the break.
Been reading too much Hawaii Pidgin, read that as ‘kine’ (Kain) threads 😂. Intead of ˈkin(ə)
Neat and all, but it’s incapable of providing outwards-pulling force.
Would be neat to see an alternative system based on compressed air thrusters.
Aren’t all suits “exo” by definition? As opposed to, say, skeletons, which makes the distinction between “exo” and “endo” necessary?
I find them specifying useful as I’m working on bringing out a new design for an endoskeleton. Where string-like fibers are embedded under the skin and into the bone.
My plan is to make them available for all my workers to help them with difficult tasks and enhance their strengths.
They’ll also let me control them like meat puppets unable to resist my command as I already make the foundation of flesh that they are built upon.
No link to more info… not even in the video.
Gut Google provides.
For those who want more info than that teaser video gives: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3746059.3747755
Wow! I can’t wait. This is better than when I became Ubisoft’s top scorer on Just Dance when I had a Grand Mal.
I saw someone in whole foods the other day wearing a lower body exosuit and talked to him about it for a while. It was very impressive. He had a stroke and no longer had control over his left leg, but this thing (it was definitely designed with aesthetics as a primary driver: lots of rainbow LED’s doing rainbow things as he walked) had 700W servos at his hips and knees and something for his ankle as well, and he was up and walking around where he said he previously was confined to a wheelchair for a couple of years.
It was pretty cool what it was providing him with, although I’m sure it was two orders of magnitude more expensive than this.