Computational Wavefront Manipulation for Novel User-Interfaces — Sriram Subramanian

We all have a natural sense of how things look and feel in the world. We have an idea about how we feel something on the skin and how our bodies orient to them. How can technology be used to bring about such feelings?

Mr Sriram Subramanian, a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies at the University of Sussex, works with his research group to deliver novel visual and tactile experiences without any wearable gadget. They achieve this by using ultrasonic speaker arrays and acoustic metamaterials to manipulate acoustic wavefronts that create haptic feedback and levitation based displays.

He is a co-founder of Ultrahaptics, which is a haptic feedback system uses ultrasonic speaker arrays to create tactile stimulations in multiple locations of the hand. This feedback is created in mid-air — so users don’t have to touch or hold any device to experience it.

Before joining Sussex, he was a Professor of Human-computer Interaction at the University of Bristol and prior to this a senior scientist at Philips Research Netherlands. He has published over 100 research articles on designing new and novel user-experiences through a combination of physical science, engineering and creativity.

“One of the visions on my research group is to deliver novel visual and tactile experiences to users without instrumenting them with wearable or head-mounted displays. We achieve this by using ultrasonic speaker arrays and acoustic metamaterials to manipulate acoustic wavefronts that create haptic feedback and levitation based displays. For example, Ultrahaptics is our haptic feedback system uses ultrasonic speaker arrays to create tactile stimulations in multiple locations of the hand. This feedback is created in mid-air — so users don’t have to touch or hold any device to experience it. In this talk, I will present some of our recent projects on this topic and conclude with the use of acoustic radiation forces to create displays based on levitation.”

Check out his work at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/368795

Co-author: Manasi Kulkarni