THP Semifinalist: A Haptic Vest With 48 Vibration Motors

September 21, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

For his entry to The Hackady Prize, [Sean] is building a haptic vest for gamers and the visually impaired. It’s exactly what you think it is: a vest with proximity sensors and motors that wrap around the wearer, providing haptic feedback of nearby obstacles. Actually building a vest with a few dozen motors is a bit of a challenge, and that’s why this project is in the running for The Hackaday Prize.

Each of the 48 motors are individually controllable with PWM. In any other project, this would require a few dozen microcontrollers or one with a whole lot of pins. [Sean], however, is using LED drivers. They do exactly what [Sean] needs them to do – an easy to interface way of a whole bunch of PWM lines – and they do it cheaper than any other solution.

For detecting objects surrounding the vest, [Sean] is using the depth sensor on a 1st gen Microsoft Kinect. In testing, [Sean] blindfolded a volunteer and had a few friends move around with cardboard ‘obstacles.’ The volunteer successfully avoided all the obstacles, as seen in the video below.

The project featured in this post is a quarterfinalist in The Hackaday Prize.

Continue reading “THP Semifinalist: A Haptic Vest With 48 Vibration Motors” →

Custom Racing Chair With A Kinect And Haptic Feedback

August 26, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 14 Comments

bestbuy_1

The people at Two Bit Circus are at it again; this time with a futuristic racing simulator where the user controls the experience. It was developed by [Brent Bushnell] and [Eric Gradman] along with a handful of engineers and designers in Los Angeles, California. The immersive gaming chair utilized an actual racing seat in the design, and foot petals were added to give the driver more of a feeling like they were actually in a real race. Cooling fans were placed on top for haptic feedback and a Microsoft Kinect was integrated into the system as well to detect hand gestures that would control what was placed on the various screens.

The team completed the project within in thirty days during a challenge from Best Buy who wanted to see if they could create the future of viewing experiences. Problems surfaced throughout the time frame though creating obstacles surrounding the video cards, monitors, and shipping dates. They got it done and are looking towards integrating their work into restaurants like Dave & Buster’s and other facilities like arcades and bars (at least that’s the rumor going around town). The 5 part mini-series that was produced around this device can be seen after the break:

Continue reading “Custom Racing Chair With A Kinect And Haptic Feedback” →

Motion Compression With Oculus Rift

May 7, 2014 by Will Sweatman 50 Comments

motion-compression-with-oculus-rift

[AlexPewPew] tipped us off on some interesting virtual reality work going on at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Mapping a user’s head movement to match the images shown in a head mounted display is something the Oculus Rift is very good at. But in order to walk and move around freely in that virtual environment requires completely different hardware. We’ve seen some ingenious setups before, but nothing as efficient as this.

In the video above, they have put sheets of bar-coded paper on the ceiling in a grid pattern. A camera that mounts on the users head looks up at the grid of papers and gets the user’s location. The neatest part though, is how they are fitting a large virtual space into a small room. As the user walks down a straight virtual path, software is slowly making the actual path in the small room curve. The end result is the user walks in circles in the small room, thinking he or she is exploring a much larger space. Neat stuff!

If you have a head mounted display lying around, and can’t think of anything to enter into The Hackaday Prize contest, this would be a great concept to work on. What are you waiting for…get hacking!

Thanks to [AlexPewPew] for the tip!

Piezos For Haptic Feedback

March 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Haptic

The most common way to put some sort of haptic feedback in an interface hasn’t changed much since the plug-in rumble pack for the Nintendo 64 controller – just put a pager motor in there and set it spinning when the user needs to feel something. This method takes a relatively long time to spin up, and even the very cool Steam controller with voice coiled directional pads can’t ‘stick’, or stay high or low to notify the user of something.

[Tim]’s day job is working with very fancy piezoelectric actuators, and when an opportunity came up to visit the Haptics symposium, he jumped at the chance to turn these actuators into some sort of interface. He ended up creating two devices: a two-piezo cellphone-sized device, and a mouse with a left click button that raises and lowers in response to the color of the mousepad.

The cellphone device contains two piezo actuators with a 10 gram weight epoxied on. A small microcontroller and piezo driver give this pseudo phone the smoothest vibrations functions you can imagine. The much more innovative color-sensing mouse has a single actuator glued to the left button, and a photosensor in the base. When the mouse rolls over a dark square on a piece of paper, the button raises. Rolling over a lighter area, the button lowers. It’s all very, very cool tech and something we’ll probably see from Apple, Microsoft, or Sony in a few years.

Videos of both devices below.

Continue reading “Piezos For Haptic Feedback” →

How To Make PinMAME Awesome

September 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

By now you should be familiar with MAME arcade cabinets and their ability to emulate any classic arcade machine from the days of yore. PinMAME is a similar setup to reconstruct classic pinball machines on computer monitors, but its popularity is nothing compared to the machines that play everything from Galaga to The Simpson’s arcade game. We won’t speculate on the reasons for that, but we do know how to make pinball emulation awesome – you need to emulate the buzzing and 60 Hz hum of solenoids found in the original machines.

This project comes from [Brendan Schrader] of the Hive76 hackerspace in Philly. It gives emulated pinball machines the tactile and haptic feedback required for a proper PinMAME setup. Inside [Brendan]’s box are two monitors, one for the backglass and one for the playfield, and a small computer to run the PinMAME software.

Also in the box are a few transducers usually used to turn any flat solid surface into a speaker. [Brendan] sent the audio output from the pinball emulation to a set of speakers and the ‘mechanical sounds’ audio to the transducer mounted to the chassis. The difference between haptic feedback and no haptic feedback is amazing, and something every PinMAME setup desperately needs.

Unfortunately, [Brendan] says he lives a decade in the past and doesn’t do the whole interwebs and email thing. He tells us he’ll send in a build log in a week or so, and we’ll put that up when it comes in.

Continue reading “How To Make PinMAME Awesome” →

Swapping LEDs With Motors On A LED Strip

September 11, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 44 Comments

Hackaday alum [Caleb Kraft] tipped us about a nice hack he got to see at the Open Hardware Summit this year. It is a flexible haptic strip made from a LED strip.

Cheap flexible printed circuit boards aren’t easy to find, so [Jacob] basically switched all the RGB LEDs of his strip with shaftless vibratory motors. The LEDs were addressed using WS2801 LED drivers so the hack also consisted in shorting the current feedback resistors. As a result, the motors will use as much current as the driver can give and [Jacob] can individually drive each motor. Luckily for him there already was an Arduino library called fastSPI to drive the strip, so he managed to make a nice haptic device in no time. In case you were wondering, the maximum number of motors you could drive is 32.

Our own [Eric Evenchick] also saw a lot of great project demos during his time at the OHS.

[via EE Times]

Disney Prototype Adds Haptic Feedback To Gestural Interface

July 29, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

disney-haptic-feedback

This little device is about the size of a webcam, and it perches on top of your computer monitor in much the same way. It’s Disney’s solution to haptic feedback for gestural input. That is to say, wave your hands in the air to control a computer, and this will give you some sense of actually touching the virtual objects.

The thing shoots toroids of air at the user. We thought the best example of how this is used is the soccer ball demo in the video. A game is being played where virtual soccer balls are launched toward the user. The rig shoots out a puff of air to go along with each ball. When you get your hand in the right place you’ll feel the vortex of air and know you’ve made contact with the virtual object.

On the hardware side this is just begging to be recreated in your basement. What we have here is a 3D printed enclosure that has six sides. Five of them have speaker elements that create pressure waves when given an electrical signal. When coordinated they cause a perfect ring vortex (think cigar smoke ring) to shoot out the flexible nozzle which can be aimed thanks to a gimbal setup. Of course the element that makes it interactive is a 3D camera, which could be a Kinect or Leap Motion when built in the home workshop.

Continue reading “Disney Prototype Adds Haptic Feedback To Gestural Interface” →