Haptic Technologies

Week 5 Wiki

What are Haptic Technologies??

Haptic Technology works by allowing the user to feel everything their touching such as in games if they touch ice cream they can feel that it is cold. It can create shocks and vibrations so that the user can have a realistic feeling as if the game or activity they were doing was real. The word Haptic comes from the Greek word meaning to touch

Examples of Haptic technology

There are many things which the technology can be used for including:

• Video games• Virtual reality • Medicine• Robotics • Art and design

Video Games and Virtual Reality

• When people are playing video games the products can be used to create a sense of the game being real.

• An example of usage is a helmet which when a user is playing the game they control their character by using their brain. This will allow users to be able to react a lot quicker to events in the game as they don’t have to think about pressing a button.

• The video game application can be used in things such as training the army or police officers in high risk situations such as a bomb or massive car pile up on a bridge.

Medicine

• The Haptic technology is useful in medicine in that it allows doctors to practice on virtual patients. This can lead to new, less experienced, doctors having greater experience which means less mistakes get made on the real patents.

Picture: Immersion's technology, which uses sensors to track motions in a hand, such as how much each joint bends, is used by aerospace manufacturers and automakers.

Robotics

• Robotics and haptic technology could be combined to form a robot which allows the robot to feel things such as pain, heat and coldness. This can be quite useful in devices such as prostatic arms and legs when a person can feel just as if they had real arms.

Art and design

• This could be used to create touch screens which allow more then one object to touch the screen at once. The user then can manipulate the objects on the screen such as photos by moving the objects, or resizing the objects.

• See the video on the link below.http://videos.howstuffworks.com/ted-conferences/1787-jeff-han-talks-about-touch-driven-computer-screens-video.htm

Resources • http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/haptic-tech

nology.htm

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology • http://www.pcworld.com/article/129670/mind_control_for_video_games

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• http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=6504527

• http://news.softpedia.com/news/Robots-With-a-Sense-of-Touch-64621.shtml

• http://news.softpedia.com/news/Robots-With-a-Sense-of-Touch-64621.shtml