HI-TECH HAPTICS
WHAT IF YOU could explore far-flung countries and reach out to touch the animals and plants all around you with your fingertips? Or feel the rumbles of being aboard your own spaceship as you pilot it through an asteroid belt by yourself? How would it feel to score the winning goal in the biggest soccer game of the century and actually feel what it’d be like to kick the ball into the net? Welcome to the world of haptic technology.
Haptic comes from the Greek word haptesthai, which means ‘to touch’ and is used to describe anything that relates to our sense of touch, just like the word ‘optic’ is linked to our sense of sight. So as you’d expect, haptic technology is all about creating experiences and interfaces that you can interact with using touch.
Once you’ve touched them, tapped them or held them, these interfaces then deliver a physical feeling back to you, which is often called haptic feedback or force feedback. This haptic feedback can feel like all kinds of things, from a vibration when you bump into something in a virtual reality game to being able to pick up a syringe and feel a resistance against a person’s skin if you’re training to be a doctor. Essentially, haptic technology is about making something that is not real feel real.
Up until now, being able to feel forces when you’re playing a game or taking part in a virtual reality experience has been confined to theme parks and arcade games, like flight simulators or motion platforms.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t have experienced force feedback on a smaller scale before. Examples include the home button on the latest iPhone, which vibrates when you press your finger on it, the rumble features on many games controllers, and even the small vibrations your fitness tracker sends you when you hit your daily steps goal. These are examples of haptic technology in action in your day-to-day life; they recreate a force when you either reach a goal or interact with your gadgets in some way.
Now, thanks to advances in technology, this kind of force feedback will not just be available at a high price at theme parks or in the form of tiny vibrations in your pocket. Instead, it’s already proving to be useful, work intuitively and has started making waves in all areas of our lives, from entertainment in our living rooms to training in our hospitals.
Most experiences we have with technology are visual and aural, like watching a movie, playing with an app or experiencing virtual reality with a headset and a pair of headphones. But haptic experiences — focused on recreating a sense of touch, like a force, vibration or temperature — are much harder to produce.
The first thing to consider is that haptic systems are bidirectional. This means you don’t just sense what’s going on, but when you touch something, you affect it too. In contrast, when you watch or hear something you have no effect on it. That means it’s easier and cheaper to recreate visual and aural displays and experiences. You don’t need to think about the effect others will have on what you’ve created, and they can also be experienced from a distance.
But more and more industries and tech companies are realising that adding haptic feedback to everything from training simulations to games is really important. That’s because we see and hear lots of things that aren’t real, like a movie about dinosaurs or a musical track that sounds like waves. Often it’s not hard to suspend our disbelief and imagine we’re actually among the pterodactyls or sat by the sea. But it’s harder to fool your sense of touch and immerse yourself in a virtual world by feeling it. That’s why it’s been difficult for tech companies to create realistic haptic experiences without advanced and expensive technology. It’s also why creating realistic haptic experiences could open up the most possibilities, because if you get it right, it’s the most convincing sense.
For example, some researchers believe that our bodies read touch information 20-times faster than sight information. So if you’re operating machinery via a screen and you’re only seeing what’s going on, you’re missing out. If you could feel it, too, your reactions would be quicker. The same applies to gaming, skills training or any other kinds of problem-solving.
On top of that, touch is also believed to be one of the most effective channels for social communication. So if companies are keen on developing social interaction tools with VR tech, such as Facebook, then adding in touch will make them more effective.
There are many different ways to create haptic displays, but most contain two key parts:
sensors and actuators. Sensors are the bits of the tech that can sense the haptic information that’s being exerted by someone, like you pushing a door with your hand in a VR game while wearing a special haptic glove. They read this information and send the force readings to the haptic rendering module.
The actuator then reads this haptic data and transforms it into a form that we can perceive, as force or vibration, like feeling resistance in the glove because the door in the game is heavy and hard to open. But whatever that form is, it can then be delivered in a number of ways. Some of the most common ways that we’re all used to are vibrations through screens and buttons. But in gaming, you can also feel forces through a stylus, joystick or glove. Because touch can be felt all over the body there’s a huge opportunity here for tech companies to create more innovative methods of delivery.
One example is the haptic bodysuit. For decades now, companies have been working on ways to create an all-over force feedback experience, which will make VR and gaming feel a lot more real. Imagine feeling sensations on your back and shoulders as you surf waves rather than just a vibration in your hand, or feeling a jab to the leg when you’re using a VR headset for martial arts training and someone has just delivered a great roundhouse kick.
A number of commercial companies have created suits over the years, such as Teslasuit, which can provide force feedback to 46 haptic points all over your body. AxonVR, another tech company, has combined a similar suit with a robotic arm to create the HaptX Skeleton.
Thanks to tech becoming more advanced and smaller, as well as the mainstream adoption of VR headsets, these suits and exoskeletons have now reached the stage where they can be snapped up by regular consumers. In the future, we expect these kinds of all-over body experiences to become commonplace and suits to become more effective, advanced and hopefully affordable.
Looking further into the future, you may not always need a physical controller or even a suit to feel touch sensations. Disney has been exploring ways to recreate a sense of touch that doesn’t require any hardware and can be felt with just your hands. The company’s AIREAL device uses air vortex rings to create shapes and objects that you can feel in the air, which would be really useful for virtual reality worlds, as well as theme park rides and entertainment.
Similarly, a company called Ultrahaptics is using ultrasound technology to project sensations directly onto your hand from an interface without anything in between. Although this kind of technology is still very new, eradicating the need for any extra hardware is bound to be more appealing to regular tech lovers and big businesses in the long-run. The challenge now is to package this technology in a way that people can actually use outside of a research lab.
Although it’s easy to see how haptic feedback can be used to make mainstream virtual reality headsets feel even more immersive and to add extra realism to gaming, there are many other ways haptic technology is making a difference.
When doctors, dentists and any other kind of medical professional are training, they need to perform procedures from standard injections through to complicated surgeries. By combining visual screens or VR headsets with haptic feedback, people can train in an environment that’s safe and gives them
plenty of room to learn and make mistakes. For example, UK-based Generic Robotics has been working on SimuTeach. The result is a combination of VR, robotics and haptic technology that creates an intra-oral injection simulator, which allows trainee dentists to practise giving an injection in an environment of unparalleled safety.
And that’s just the beginning. Although haptic feedback seems so appealing because it allows us to touch virtual worlds, it can also be used to let us better interact with the real world, too. One great example is the way force feedback is becoming invaluable for telerobotics. This type of feedback is particularly helpful when someone is controlling a robot or machine from a distance. With the help of haptic technology, controlling a remote robot becomes not only easier but much more efficient. As these kinds of robots are used in dangerous situations, such as nuclear power plants, anything that will improve telerobotic operations has the potential to revolutionise countless industries. On a more personal scale, haptic technology could be added to many of our favourite gadgets. Right now, we know many electronics vibrate, but these small force feedback cues could be used more and more, like when you move a folder to a new spot on your desktop. Perhaps in future, you’ll be able to programme different forces, textures and even temperatures depending on the kinds of notifications that you wish to receive.
As haptic technology advances, it will no longer be confined to research labs or theme parks. Instead, experiences that go beyond sight and sound will be coming to homes and businesses across the world, making gaming feel more sensational and helping robots to get better at their jobs. With this technology still in its infancy, we can be sure that an exciting futures lies ahead.