Haptography: Capturing the Feel of Surfaces
When I was little I’d always go to museums and I’d love to touch anything I got my hands on. Well I mean who doesn’t 😅
But what disappointed me as a child was that I couldn’t touch certain artifacts because there were usually too old and important.
But the question is what if you could touch that artifact and feel the texture of the artifact but the artifact is not there?
Well, you may be thinking,
How the hell is that even possible? Feeling something that’s not there?
I know it’s pretty surprising. But your sense of touch is really important. It’s involved in every physical task you do every day. So the sense of touch is pretty interesting.
Tactile and Kinesthetic
The sense of touch has two main components. Tactile and Kinesthetic sensations.
Tactile sensations are things that you feel in your skin for example,
- Contact location
- Pressure
- Vibration
- Temperature
The second is called Kinesthetic sensations and this has to with the position of your body and how it’s moving and the forces you encounter with it. Some of these sensations are,
- Position
- Orientation
- Force
Therefore humans are good at combining these two sensations to help to understand what you’re physically feeling at any given moment.
But, is there any way people could enhance our sense of touch by using computers and machines?
Well Yeah!
Haptic Technology
As you would’ve guessed Haptic Technology is all about interactive touch technology.
In a nutshell, you are moving your body in the world and engineers can create a system that measures that motion, and then show you sensations over time that matches up with what your feeling in the world and can fool you into thinking you’re touching something even though there’s nothing there.
But Erm how can you even capture how these object feel and recreate those experiences?
Glad you asked 😄
Anywho, engineers solve this problem by creating a hand-held tool that has a bunch of sensors inside. These sensors include a force sensor, which shows how hard your pushing, motion tracking so can show exactly where you moved it; and it has a vibration sensor, an accelerometer, inside, that can detect the shaking back and forth that lets you know what you’re touching.
This data is then recorded from all these interactions and creates a mathematical model for all these different sensations that are happening, and it is then programmed into a screen and when you use the hand-held tool on the screen it plays vibrations to give you the illusion that you’re touching the real object but you’re actually not.
Isn’t that so cool! 😃
This can be used on all kinds of surfaces and it can be a lot of fun!
This is a branch of haptic technology and which is called haptography.
Haptography
As you can feel this technology has a lot of potential when it comes to certain things like online shopping, videogames or maybe those museums that I mentioned earlier.
Another example of a haptography implication is sports.
Most athletes tend to get good at sports because they practice. They practice more and more and they get guidance from a coach and they burn those body movements into their muscle memory.
This can be learned through a Kinect to measure our motions and graph them on a screen. This data is then sent to your arms as haptic feedback and they’re connected through a device called haptic armbands.
These armbands, in theory, can guide you as you move and get you good at a sport.
About Me
Hope you enjoyed reading my article on Haptography! if you’re interested in talking email me at Ermeyas22@gmail.com
