Meant to be Seen

Goal: Design a Haptic add-on device to work with existing hand/positional tracking options (Leap Motion, Control VR, STEM)

Mantra: "Focus on the Haptics, not the positional Tracking"

I would like to discuss this with all seriousness.

Design Concept: In-Hand controller whose base unit is in your palm (opposite your knuckles) with resistance (hydraulic, pneumatic, or mechanical) piston/cylinders stretching from this base unit to each of the users finger tips.

Let's talk about that!

Okay, you're going to laugh, but if you use a speaker like this one and cup your hand over the speaker part with an air tight seal, you can get some pretty neat haptics out of it. Guns firing, rumble, anything you like.

Speakers have the unique capability to do high fidelity haptics. Perhaps it's also possible to attach a weight to the diaphragm to make the whole thing vibrate.


The question is, how do you create haptic sound forms to use with them? Contact Microphones!

Slap a table, fire a gun, hit a tennis ball, pour yourself a glass of water, jack off, punch someone while wearing a contact microphone on your hand.

The unique mechanical waveforms will be captured by the mic and can be replayed by the speaker.

I know it works because I tried this at Siggraph a couple years ago.

That's a really neat approach to replicating touch sensations when handling objects.

I think touch is second only to 'resistance force: how to stop your fingers and thumb mechanically on all 3 axes x/y/z?'

So here are some rough sketches of the controller concept I have in mind.

Got my 3D printer over the weekend. As soon as it is assembled I'll start trying to model these concepts out. If someone is willing to assist with the modeling, that would be a huge help.

That's really cool, do you just need a contact mic, amp and speaker?

Here is a link to a haptic feedback arm, the Novint Xio. The user straps it on, perhaps allowing for significant force feedback possibilities. Note that it has been "coming soon" for a VERY long time. So, that suggests that they may have run into either technical or marketing problems that prevented it from being a viable product.
http://www.novint.com/index.php/products/novintxio

I am also frustrated that their haptic feedback desktop controller (the Falcon) has no CAD software support. I don't how how many games will work with it. But, I imagine this is something that is difficult to fully implement in a game, with very few users who would take advantage of it. So, it would rarely be done by the game/cad software vendors.

-Joe

zalo wrote:Okay, you're going to laugh, but if you use a speaker like this one and cup your hand over the speaker part with an air tight seal, you can get some pretty neat haptics out of it. Guns firing, rumble, anything you like.

Speakers have the unique capability to do high fidelity haptics. Perhaps it's also possible to attach a weight to the diaphragm to make the whole thing vibrate.


The question is, how do you create haptic sound forms to use with them? Contact Microphones!

Slap a table, fire a gun, hit a tennis ball, pour yourself a glass of water, jack off, punch someone while wearing a contact microphone on your hand.

The unique mechanical waveforms will be captured by the mic and can be replayed by the speaker.

I know it works because I tried this at Siggraph a couple years ago.

Saw this now. Good info about the speaker. Researching how to build a full body exoskeleton with haptics now. A friend is a speaker designer.

By the way...read that post thoroughly..."tried this at siggraph" was pretty funny.