At Volkswagen’s CES press conference on Monday, the company introduced the Golf R Touch,
a concept car with a cockpit that relies (only a little bit ironically)
on touchless gestural interfaces for control. If we’re going to have to
use mid-air, hand-wavy interfaces in near the future—whether for cars
or wearables or around the home—an important issue to consider (as with
any user interface) is tactile feedback. For example, when you press a
virtual button in mid-air that doesn’t feel like anything, how do you
know that you’ve actually pushed it? Easy: ultrasonic forcefield technology. And it’s amazing.
We wrote about this thing (the “acoustic radiation force field generator”)
last month in more of a research context, but yesterday at CES, we got
to talk to its developers (from an outfit called Ultrahaptics) and try
it out for ourselves.
There’s an array of ultrasonic speakers that (in this demo
implementation) are paired with a Leap Motion sensor that tracks the
location of your hand in space. By creating constructively
interfering intersections of ultrasonic waves, the Ultrahaptics
system can generate silent points of turbulence in the air that that
essentially trick you into thinking your fingertips are touching
objects when they’re not. An array of ultrasonic emitters created this
illusion anywhere up to a meter from the sensor (although this distance
can be increased). Although the demonstration included a flat array of
sensors under the user’s hand, Ultrahaptics says that they can be arranged in different locations and orientations and they can still work together in the same way, as long as its software knows the exact position of the ultrasonic emitters.
Using this thing is very, very cool. It’s much like using the haptic
feedback on a cellphone’s software keyboard, except that it comes out of
nowhere. Your fingers just feel a gentle buzzing as you hold them in
the air over the emitter. It can’t really provide the feeling of
texture, but it can do a variety of “haptic sensations,” such as a
stream of virtual bubbles moving through the air and softly popping on
your fingertips.
The good news, going forward, is that most of
Ultrahaptics’ hardware is very inexpensive to produce. Ultrasonic
emitters themselves are dirt cheap, because they’re already produced in
volume as (among other things) proximity sensors in cars.
Ultrahaptics wouldn’t say exactly when or where we’d see the first
consumer product, although they’ve had interest from automotive
companies (Hear that, Volkswagen?) and they’re expecting that we’ll be
seeing some integrated mid-air tactile feedback systems within the next
few years.
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