Haptic technology is used so often now, it’s generally taken for granted or considered a mildly interesting novelty. One possible reason is that people never refer to it as haptic technology. It’s when you touch-tap your smartphone, and the keys send your fingers a little buzz for every letter you enter. If you are a gamer, the rumbling sensation your Wii controller sends through your fingers, hands and wrist as you slice through fruit or whack a tennis ball are both haptic effects. But this “touch feedback technology” has uses far beyond enhancing your game experience or vibrating your digits. It has an interesting application in the rehabilitation of stroke patients as well as surgical training. Scientists have invented a new method of haptic feedback utilizing ultrasound. This is an astonishing transformation of digital information into a physical and interactive presence. The 3D haptic shapes that appear in mid-air can be both seen and felt.
Imagine using your favorite CAD or 3D modeling software, but instead of being separated by the keyboard and the mouse, you are able to mold it with your hands. What if you could feel the load-bearing qualities of an optimized load bearing structure, or touch the face of a sculpture before deciding what material you are going to 3D print it in? The applications can stretch as far as you’d like. I’m not talking about only motion-control and buzzing effects; I’m talking about feeling the shape of the actual object by experiencing haptic feedback technology using your bare hands. The most exciting part of this line of technological exploration is the potential to feel, hold and collaborate on a new 3D object with a team spread out across the world. Though it’s not there yet, the potential ecosystem which could arise from ultrasound 3D haptic shape technology could encompass the ability to accurately simulate the feeling virtual 3D objects in a pallet of materials. This could end up saving researchers, engineers and hobbyists the expense of wasting expensive 3D printing materials. Instead of choosing the right material for your prototype by printing an object in those materials, you could select it by feeling it before it exists as a physical object. This would have a tremendous impact on the 3D printing industry.
Researchers at theUniversity of Bristol, envision that this technology could be used to transform the way that we engage with 3D haptic shapes. It could also lead to “kinesthetic holograms” to be used for anything from augmenting classroom learning to enhancing a gaming experience. By allowing users to feel features of the game, or objects in a museum, it could allow for a new way to digitally engage and explore the world without the need for physical travel. In medicine, it could allow for surgeons to physically feel the shapes of tumors and possibly even explore physical abnormalities with fetuses.
The method is described inACM Transactions on Graphicsin great detail. An effect is produced by ultrasound called acoustic radiation force. This is what makes it possible to feel the scattering and absorption of the acoustic wave. By observing how sound waves behave when they hit an object, it is possible to deduce the shape of the object. By then focusing complex patterns of ultrasound onto our hands, the researchers created air disturbances that could be both felt on the skin and seen as floating 3D shapes. Of course, the ultrasound patterns cannot be seen by themselves, but by directing the device at a layer of oil, “depressions at the surface appeared as spots when illuminated.”
Lead author Dr. Ben Long said, “Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space are all possible ways of using this system. In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be possible, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artifacts in a museum.”
As we move into 2015, it is becoming clear to me that the evolution of the relationship between digital and physical data is maturing to a new phase. Virtual reality, holograms, haptic technology, 3D printing, scanning and modelling software are creating a foundational synthesis between physical and digital data structures that will bear a unique new reality in an unknown form.
