Reading These 5 Facts About Haptics Sensors Keeps Your Senses Growing

Touch is the initial feeling that animals develop while still in the womb. Human newborns have been seen to have a great deal of trouble living if they lack a sense of touch, even if they have sight and hearing. VR, like human babies, is in its infancy, and it sorely needs additional senses added to the mix if the business is to thrive. Haptics (or universal "touch" sensation) will be what propels virtual reality from a niche/hobbyist interest to the next paradigm for all human communications.

Fact 1: What Are Haptics?

Haptic communication is a type of nonverbal communication that relates to how humans and animals communicate and connect via the sense of touch. Haptics (pronounced HAP-tiks) is a science that applies touch (tactile) sensations and controls to interaction with computer programmes. It is more directly tied to VR. Haptics adds another dimension to a VR or 3D world and is critical to the experience of real immersion in those settings; it is most typically found in the usage of Vibration or Electrostatic Shock in contact with the skin.

Users can get input from computer programmes with physical sensations in the hand or other areas of the body by employing external devices (specially created Gloves, Shoes, Joysticks, and so on). Even if you didn't know it, you've probably come into contact with haptic technology in your daily life. Vibration is used as a type of output by the majority of smartphones with touch displays. Touchscreens are just flat panels of glass, as opposed to keypad keys, which have texture and contour. Because the buttons on them are virtual and lack a "click," the phone's vibration feature is employed to replicate the tactile sense of buttons. Those same vibrations may be utilised to transmit data.

Haptic technology is critical for higher-quality VR experiences and may be used for everything from teaching surgeons to building more accurate virtual baseball games. For example, playing tennis in VR with someone would be enhanced by haptics by allowing both of you to not only see the moving ball, but also position and swing your tennis racket and feel the hit of the ball as you serve. Haptic devices will allow users to bring more than just their eyes into their virtual environment of choice, potentially expanding the possibilities of Augmented Reality applications.

Fact 2: Haptics Are Important

The sci-fi novel "Ready Player One," according to most VR lovers, is the defining fundamental work of modern VR. The main character in this novel is situated in the OASIS, a virtual reality simulator, and to access it, he wears a headset plus a unique set of gloves to navigate the virtual world. Aside from the gloves, there are a slew of additional idea goods on the horizon, such as towers that release aromas from the virtual world and wind/temperature generators that imitate real-life conditions, making the illusion of immersion that much simpler to achieve.

Companies like Haptx have been developing this for over a decade. New startups like VRgluv have also made significant progress.

However, achieving actual full-touch emulation is not as straightforward as one may seem at first. Humans, as visually-focused creatures, frequently fail to recognise how great our sense of touch truly is. Our sensation of touch is derived from a variety of different organs. We can identify everything about an object that we can see with our eyes (excluding its colour or visual patterns) with our hands, and we can also determine things that we can't see with our eyes. Handling anything allows us to identify its hardness, shape, temperature, texture, and weight. These high sensory talents are responsible for your ability to discover anything in your luggage amongst other random debris without looking.

While some of this may appear far-fetched and difficult to construct, we're actually a lot closer than most people know. There are several third-party firms creating goods for use with popular systems like as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. However, in the absence of industry norms, many of them have either failed to launch or leave a lot to be desired.

Currently, the majority of VR users utilise Touch Controllers. Simple wand-based devices featuring a few buttons and motion tracking, as well as a couple joysticks to ease the transition. These will suffice for the time being, but they are significantly inadequate in more diversified applications that demand more than simply a point-and-click interface.

There can be no gaps when it comes to complete immersion. With Virtual Reality attempting to be the next big computer platform, including the full body into VR will be critical to closing the gap that current users encounter. Looking around while sitting in a chair, as much as we'd want to believe, doesn't truly make you feel like you're there experiencing something. We now cater to only two of the five senses, hearing and sight, with the remaining three still up for consideration (Touch, Smell, and Taste)

But, here is what the world doesn't know. Secretly somewhere deep in a room or dormitory few of the engineers have been trying to reverse engineer these sense in to reality.

Fact 3: Sense of Touch

Imagine a blind woman being able to?touch her smartphone screen and bring?up a relief map of the room to help navigate?the unfamiliar space. Or a soldier?feeling the little finger of his newborn?daughter 6,000 miles away via Zoom.

Piezoelectric haptics work on the principle of the piezoelectric effect wherein electric charge accumulates in certain materials in response to mechanical stress. Using this concept enables high definition haptics with faster response time, higher bandwidth, no mechanical sounds, and stronger vibrations. Startups are working on solutions to the challenge of high power consumption that limits the widespread adoption of piezoelectric haptics.

South Korean startup Dot Incorporation uses haptics to produce smart devices for the visually impaired. The Dot Watch enables calls, messaging, and other features of smartwatches, all in braille. Further, the Dot Mini is a smart media device that provides access to books, documents, and music. These devices use the startup’s piezoelectric cell to facilitate tactile literacy.

Fact 4 : Sense of Smell

Dr. Osh Agabi’s solution to one of biotechnology’s thorniest problems looks like an iridescent purple nipple the size of a steering wheel. Other than that, it’s inconspicuous. It doesn’t beep or pulse or hum. Hanging from a wall, it just sits quietly and smells.

Airports, arenas, factories, people—they all stink, and they stink in particular ways. We know this because our noses tell us so. But attempts to re-create our oldest sensory experience with machines and technology have been woefully lacking. Modern everyday devices might be smart enough to recognize our faces and voices, read our pulses, and track our motions, but they can’t smell. The best example of a commercial device that can reliably pick up chemical signals in the air hasn’t changed in years. It’s called a smoke detector.

Konikore, Koniku's flagship device, contains a chip that merges living genetically modified brain cells and traditional silicon. The technology works on the basis that silicon alone is insufficient for processing and interpreting data from human smell.

Fact 5: Sense of Taste

IBM Research - Hypertaste caters to a wide range of industrial and scientific users with a growing need to identify liquids swiftly and reliably without access to high-end laboratories. Consider a government agency interested in an on-the-fly water quality check of a lake or river at a remote location. Or a manufacturer wanting to verify the origin of raw materials. Or a food producer trying to identify counterfeit wines or whiskeys. The quick, in-situ identification and classification of liquids is relevant also in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, to name just a few more examples.

Apart from these many brain interfacing startups will make us think and imagine the world we live in virtual-virtual reality. Who knows, in the future, we may have to learn Kung Fu through a brain interfacing starter kit like Neo in The Matrix.