The Haptic Radar / Extended Skin Project

Ever wanted some cat's whiskers or insect antenna? Probably not, but check out this head-mounted haptic device developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan. It lets a wearer "feel" their surroundings from a distance, roughly as if they had several long whiskers sticking out of the head. At least, that's what the researchers say.

A series of infrared sensors positioned around the device act as invisible whisker or antenna sensors. When these detect an object, a small motor vibrates on the appropriate side of the wearer's head to alert them.

We've written plenty about similar haptic devices, including head-mounted ones. For example, this report from the Siggraph2007 conference includes a couple of interesting hand-based haptic devices. This magazine article rounds-up several other research projects including a headband that converts video footage into signals felt by the user on their forehead.

I've never seen this type of haptic device being tested out, however. So it's interesting to see this video of volunteers using the device after just a few minutes instruction. I was impressed by how instinctively people react to an incoming object while wearing the device. Another clip shows the same device being used to navigate a virtual maze. It must be a freaky feeling.

Via: Hackaday

Will Knight, online technology editor

We are developing a wearable and modular device allowing users to perceive and respond to spatial information using haptic cues in an intuitive and unobstrusive way.The system is composed of an array of "optical-hair modules", each of which senses range information and transduces it as an appropriate vibro-tactile cue on the skin directly beneath it. An analogy for our artificial sensory system in the animal world would be the cellular cilia, insect antennae, as well as the specialized sensory hairs of mammalian whiskers. In the future, this modular interface may cover precise skin regions or be distributed in over the entire body surface and then function as a double-skin with enhanced and tunable sensing capabilities. We speculate that for a particular category of tasks (such as clear path finding and collision avoidance), the efficiency of this type of sensory transduction may be greater than what can be expected from more classical vision-to-tactile substitution systems. Among the targeted applications of this interface are visual prosthetics for the blind, augmentation of spatial awareness in hazardous working environments, as well as enhanced obstacle awareness for car drivers (in this case the extended-skin sensors may cover the surface of the car).

In a word, what we are proposing here is to build artificial, wearable, ligh-based hairs (or antennae). The actual hair stem will be an invisible, steerable laser beam. In the near future, we may be able to create on-chip, skin-implantable whiskers using MOEMS technology. Results in a similar direction have been already achieved in the framework of the smart laser scanner project in our lab. Our first prototype (headband configuration) provides the wearer with 360 degrees of spatial awareness and had very positive reviews in our proof-of-principle experiments.

Movies

• Prototype proof-of-principle collision-avoidance experiment: (April 2006): [wmv: 21MB] / [mov: 131MB / 29MB]
  
  
• Computer-controlled headband simulator (virtual maze): [wmv: 10MB]
  

Reference

1. 
   
   Cassinelli, A., Reynolds, C. and Ishikawa, M. (2006) "Augmenting spatial awareness with Haptic Radar". Tenth International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), October 11 - 14, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland. Short paper (4 pages) [PDF-103KB]. Slide presentation [PPT-6.4MB]. Unpublished long version (6 pages) [PDF-268KB].
   
   


2. 
   
   Cassinelli, A., Reynolds, C. and Ishikawa, M. "Haptic Radar". The 33rd International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), August 1, (2006), Boston, Massachusetts, USA. [PDF-202KB, Large Quicktime Video, Small Quicktime Video, MPG-4].
   
   


3. More detailed project web page: http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/perception/HapticRadar/HapticRadar_LongPage.html