As the future looks more likely to involve virtual communication and interaction, creating responsive, immersive tactile and haptic feedback systems has become a goal for many engineers and virtual reality developers.
While the visual and audio sides of VR have grown and been refined over the last few decades, haptic device development has remained more or less stagnant.
Haptic technology involves devices that communicate information to the user by recreating or imitating a sense of touch. This typically uses sensors and mechanical components to give the user a sensation of force, vibration and motion through feedback.
Today there are some companies aiming to breathe life into haptics by designing the new innovations and finding new applications for the technology.
William Provancher, founder of Tactical Haptics, hopes to bring haptic feedback for VR up to par with the advances already seen by visual and audio VR capabilities.
“What’s really interesting is that everything on the vision and audio sides have advanced in the last 20 years since the first emergence of VR. But haptic feedback is really still where it was 20 years ago when it first came out in the N64 controller. It just vibrates, the same as with your cell phone when you get a text message,” Provancher explained.
“So people can be in VR, they can look around and they can see everything in the real world represented in that game world. They can hear everything, because there are 3D audio models. They will reach out, but the best they will feel is a vibration, which if you’re tapping on something, that’s good. If you’re shooting something, that’s good, or a grenade, or a tank you’re driving, that’s fabulous. But what happens if I’m Indiana Jones, and I’m pulling on the lever to release the trap door? You can’t create the right sense of inertia or elasticity with vibration feedback, at least not that we’ve figured out yet.”
Tactical Haptics came to the USA Science and Engineering Festival to give kids the opportunity to try out their unique controllers and play in a virtual reality game.
In the video above, ENGINEERING.com’s own Shawn Wasserman was also lucky enough to take a turn at the controls, and spoke to William Provancher, the founder of Tactical Haptics, about the engineering behind the tech.
(Image courtesy of Tactical Haptics.)
There are a number of engineering challenges inherent in designing haptic technology.
“The challenge with designing for haptics systems is that you have to provide stimulus to the sense of touch,” Provancher described. “But it turns out that people are really sensitive to a lot of the things present in engineering systems, such as vibration.
“You want to design a device that will give you the stimulus that you want, without including a lot of other distracting things,” Provancher said.
“Most engineering systems, such as a car, will push you down the road and will do that very well. But it also happens to create a lot of vibrations, which for a haptic device could be really distracting,” Provancher added.
The touch feedback in Tactical Haptics’ controllers come from sliding contractor plates integrated into the device handle.
Translational motion is portrayed by plates moving in unison in the corresponding direction to the action being performed. By having opposing plates more in opposing directions, the user will instead feel the feedback of a wrench or jolt in their hand.
“If you grab on to an object, when you are interacting with it, you can feel the forces as you move through space,” Provancher explained.
“What we’re doing is mimicking those friction forces, as if you were grabbing onto that in-game object. We do that by putting actuators inside the device that moves the sliding plates around and recreate those friction forces to create a beautiful illusion that there is physical interaction happening.”
While the mechanics themselves aren’t specifically new, the simple mechanisms combined with the user’s perception is what achieves great results, Provancher explained.
“The innovation is really on the side of psychology; it is the human perception side of things. The mechanisms inside are pretty simple: three linear actuators that provide the same type of stretching motions to your skin that you’re doing if you were holding on to that in game object.”
VR applications are the most hotly anticipated application for this technology, whether for enhancing video games or being used for computer design. We can be sure gamers and VR enthusiasts everywhere have their fingers crossed for Tactical Haptics’ success.
For more information, visit the Tactical Haptics website.