3/04/2008

Virtually touching

What would happen if your computer mouse pushed back? What would it be like to click on an image of a ceramic bunny on your computer screen and not only see it, but feel its shape and texture through your mouse? Visitors to Ralph Hollis’s lab today are getting a feel for this type of touch-based, or haptic, interface.

A team led by Hollis, a research professor in the Robotics Institute, developed a haptic interface based on magnetic levitation, which enables computer users to feel virtual objects. Most other haptic interfaces use motors and mechanical linkages to make it seem as if you feel an object, or experience some force feedback. Even some video game control pads can vibrate to give players some tactile feedback. But Hollis built a device with a single moving part that floats on magnetic fields and the result, he says, is perhaps the most realistic sense of touch provided by any such device in the world.

A group of local journalists got their hands on the devices this morning and the larger campus and technical community are likewise giving the interfaces a test drive this afternoon at a lab open house. They can draw a virtual stylus across different surfaces, feeling the varying textures, or they can push a box around inside a larger box on a computer screen, not only watching it bounce off the inner walls of the larger box, but feeling the rebound in their hands. In another demo, involving one haptic interface for each hand, they can lift and throw boxes or balance balls, feeling the heft of each.

This isn’t a technology that most people will have in their homes any time soon. In fact, only now, thanks to some funding from the National Science Foundation, has Hollis made enough of these devices to share them with other haptic interface researchers in the U.S. and Canada. But Hollis believes they could be used eventually to teleoperate robots, train surgeons and dentists and check the fit of parts designed on computers before they are ever built, among other uses. No one yet knows what all of the possibilities might be.

Byron Spice