#haptic glove

[nuadox]

HaptX unveils HaptX Gloves Development Kit

- By Nuadox Crew -

HaptX, a provider of realistic haptic technology, today unveiled the HaptX Gloves Development Kit, an industrial-grade product for advanced simulation in virtual reality. HaptX Gloves aims to enable professional VR users to develop simulations with realistic touch feedback and natural interaction for the first time.

"With HaptX Gloves, leading automotive and aerospace companies can touch and interact with their vehicles before they are built, radically reducing time and cost for design iterations," said Jake Rubin, founder and CEO of HaptX. "Industrial and government organizations can deploy virtual training solutions that build real muscle memory, providing a safe, cost-effective and flexible alternative to live training."

"Realistic touch is the missing link for many enterprise VR applications," said Jason Welsh, managing director in Accenture's Extended Reality practice. "We are particularly interested in how HaptX's precise motion tracking and realistic touch can help enhance the effectiveness of immersive learning solutions for our clients."

The HaptX Gloves Development Kit includes two gloves, each featuring 130 tactile actuators that provide realistic touch across the hand and fingertips. Built with HaptX's patented microfluidic technology, HaptX Gloves also deliver powerful force feedback and industry-leading motion tracking with sub-millimeter precision. The HaptX SDK supports Unity and Unreal Engine 4, making it easy to create new content or upgrade existing VR experiences for HaptX Gloves. When combined with a VR headset, HaptX Gloves revolutionize human-machine interaction, enabling users to feel virtual objects with unprecedented realism.

"The HaptX Gloves Development Kit provides a new level of haptic fidelity and realism," said Mary Hamilton, managing director and lead of the Digital Experiences R&D group at Accenture Labs. "Accenture is looking forward to seeing how HaptX Gloves will enhance the capabilities of VR for human-machine interaction."

The HaptX Gloves Development Kit makes its worldwide debut Oct. 3, 2018, at the Future of Storytelling® Summit in New York City and the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.

Image: Visualization of HaptX Gloves Development Kit in automotive design VR application.

Source: HaptX

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[d1000100]

A Real Life Haptic Glove (Ready Player One Technology Today) - Smarter E...

OMG!!!! THIS IS SOOO COOOOOL!!! 

[j-foottit-creativetech]

One of the changes I am looking at making is using the IMU orientation to give a 2D screen position so that the glove can be used as a mouse input. In order to do this I am looking at projecting from a point onto a plane using the IMU orientation to define the line vector. The wikipedia page provides a useful reference for the math involved.

[dbrown-creativetech]

Unifying quirks

Progress has been made with regard to having the external electronic components integrate with unity. These include the Kinect hand tracking SDK from 3Gear and an IMU that we have salvaged from Jacques previous studio project.

These devices both work on a coordinate system that differs from the base coordinate system of unity!! This essentially means that one or more of the axis are reversed..not a problem I hear you say.. just flip the axis!? Those are the words that went thought my mind too.... this was not as straight forward as I had hoped.

Firstly the Kinect hand tracking software was using a right handed co-ordinate system whereas unity uses a left handed system... again not a huge problem... but after converting the Quaternion values into Euler (x,y,z) the axis seemed to misbehave and produce strange rotational results! Some tweaking and a little guidance from Stefan got this working after a couple of days of battle! Unfortunately the rotation of the hand appears to have a dead spot where the camera drops the detection of the hand all together... this happens when the hand is parallel to the screen. This is where a IMU would help to cover that motion.

Secondly the addition of the IMU has proven fairly difficult. We decided to add this component as the Kinect tracking; while working pretty well, seems to have a limited range of visual motion which causes a problem when the hand moves to edges of the screen. 

The IMU seems to have its own coordinate system again...... brilliant! The data that it spits out is encapsulated in a string, in comma delimited HEX format which then needs to be split up, converted to a floating point number and then injected into a quaternion!!! This has proven to be no easy task. However.. after some tricky conversion steps this has been achieved.... the rotation still appears to be a little strange but it essentially working. 

A regrettable characteristic of the IMU is that it is not good for positional tracking. Which means that the position will have to be done entirely using the Kinect.

[dbrown-creativetech]

Electromagnetic Actuator

After a discussion with a friend the possibility of using an electromagnetic actuator to provide a sense of pressure at the fingertips started to take shape...I am still not sure if this is possible but the following video it doing something similar on a very small scale which might fit the project.

[j-foottit-creativetech]

While searching for a place to source vibration motors locally, I came across this Haptic Motor Driver from TI that looks perfect for our application. My main concern is that it is a BGA package so may be difficult to solder in place with the equipment I have available.

[dbrown-creativetech]

Virtual control

The later part of today was spent working on re-designing the control system within the virtual environment. A major design flaw in the program that I had put together was that the hand was attached directly to the camera... this meant that physics and other such things that affected the actual hand were not working properly as the mouse control would override them. 

I was able to set up a bounding box which when the hand was moved out of a 'deadzone' would then move the camera... this provided a basic control mechanism that made more sense to the overall process.

After some discussion with Jacques it was suggested that this be done using a cylinder and have the camera rotate and adjust according to the location of the hand in 3d space.

At present I am testing this with the mouse but I hope to implement the NimbleSDK components soon to get this working.

The movement is fine for a rough idea and tomorrow I will be working on getting the serial feedback to the arduino.. perhaps just getting an LED to illuminate when the hand collides with the virtual object!!

[dbrown-creativetech]

Limitations

After considering several different ways of providing a pressure based feedback it is clear to us that having limited time and budget is going to be a huge factor to its outcome. 

Creative, cost effective solutions are required!!! 

Options include : 

pneumatic's 

solenoids

inflation pouches

muscle wire

pivotal pieces at the end of the finger

Each of these has their strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed and weighed up. Best option is to prototype as many as we can and see which gives the best response.