Planet Arduino

When trying to imagine a new way of interacting with either a video game or even another person remotely, being able to feel both temperature and touch sensations isn’t what most people would have in mind. However, thanks to some very interesting research being done by University of California, Santa Barbara student Bowen Zhang and professor Misha Sra, a novel method for interacting with the virtual world could come quite soon. 

The project, which Zhang calls the “PneuMod,” is a modular system of tiny air bladders that each have a Peltier element on their surface. Then using an Arduino Mega and a custom-designed control board, commands can be sent from a laptop that open or close solenoid valves to let air inflate/deflate the air bladders, thus creating pressure against the wearer’s skin. Different temperatures are safely produced by combining the Peltier elements with temperature sensors, and by adjusting the polarity of the current headed to these elements, both hot and cold can be achieved with the exact same hardware. 

Currently, the PneuMod can be fitted into a forearm cuff, ankle/wrist bands, and a headband. This led Zhang to begin experimenting with virtual reality gaming integrations where the user can physically experience when they have been hit with an object, along with its temperature. You can read more about this project here in its paper and watch his explanation video below.

The post PneuMod is a wearable haptic device that produce pressure and thermal feedback appeared first on Arduino Blog.

While there are tools that allow the visually impaired to interact with computers, conveying spacial relationships, such as those needed for gaming, is certainly a challenge. To address this, researchers have come up with DualPanto.

As the name implies, the system uses two pantographs for location IO, and on the end of each is a handle that rotates to indicate direction. One pantograph acts as an output to indicate where the object is located, while the other acts as a player’s input interface. One device is positioned above the other, so the relative position of each in a plane can be gleaned. 

The game’s software runs on a MacBook Pro, and an Arduino Due is used to interface the physical hardware with this setup. 

DualPanto is a haptic device that enables blind users to track moving objects while acting in a virtual world.

The device features two handles. Users interact with DualPanto by actively moving the ‘me’ handle with one hand and passively holding on to the ‘it’ handle with the other. DualPanto applications generally use the me handle to represent the user’s avatar in the virtual world and the it handle to represent some other moving entity, such as the opponent in a soccer game.

Be sure to check it out in the video below, or read the full research paper here.