Class on wed is for help on your project-
If you want to spend the time in the real world documenting / videoing that's also
great. If you do not come to class I will be harder on you so do a good job.
If you come to class I can help you get your work together for next weeks final-
At this point it seems like it's just a matter of time before every device shown on Star Trekbecomes a reality and, thanks to a new innovation, the holodeck could be next.
A UK company called Ultrahaptics has developed a method of providing haptic feedback for holographic imagery by using ultrasonic technology.
Originally developed in the research labs at the University of Bristol, the developers of the system can deliver different haptic feedback and virtually tactile shapes through ultrasonic waves by pulsing the feedback of the ultrasonic waves or changing their modulation frequency.
The change in pressure that creates the virtual shapes and force sensations is termed "acoustic radiation pressure."
To better wrap your head around the concept, think of the fictional mid-air interface show inMinority Report, a type of system promised by real world companies such as Leap Motion, that allow you to manipulate computer data with gestures in the air. Now add texture and force feedback to such a mid-air interface and you begin to understand the possibilities of Ultrahaptics' system.
"We've been working on this for over four years," Tom Carter, the CTO of Ultrahaptics and a member of the team that developed the technology, told Mashable. "The goal of the company isn't to launch its own product, we want this tech to become embedded in lots of different products, from clocks, to home appliances to cars. To do that, we needed to engage OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] as a company."
Artist's concept rendering of Ultrahaptics being used to control a car's dashboard interface.
IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
The breakthrough, said Carter, who was working on his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Bristol before helping to launch the company, has to do with the optimization of the algorithms that control the ultrasonic waves. "Previously, it's been possible to focus ultrasound to a point," Carter said, but those attempts yielded unstable results.
The Ultrahaptics solution uses an algorithm that better controls the volumetric distribution of the acoustic radiation force fields.
Artist's concept rendering of Ultrahaptics working in concert with the Oculus Rift.
IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
But, according to Carter, simple interface controls are just the beginning. Further out, in as little as three to four years, he envisions the successful three-dimensional haptic lab experiments being integrated into real world products and situations that most of us could experience on a daily basis. But what most excites Carter are the possibilities of Ultrahaptics being used in virtual reality.
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The holy grail for this has to be virtual reality
The holy grail for this has to be virtual reality," said Carter. "There's a huge amount of development going into things like the Oculus Rift. Now you can only see and hear, you can't touch. So the ultimate hope would be that you could put on those virtual reality goggles and feel and touch the virtual world."
Although the current version of the technology works in a lab setting, Carter said we'll have to wait a bit longer to see some of the commercial applications of the technology.
"For example, being able to [use the technology to] control a simple device with a button, like an alarm clock, for instance," Carter said. "The alarm goes off and you just wave your hand out into a general area and it could project feeling onto your hand, and you could tap or swipe, and it would allow you to snooze... We'd love to have a commercial product on the shelves in one to two years."
BONUS: What Is Virtual Reality and How Does It Work?
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An engineered scallop that is only a fraction of a millimeter in size and that is capable of swimming in biomedically relevant fluids has been developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart.
Designing robots on the micro or nano scale (like, small enough to fit inside your body) is all about simplicity. There just isn’t room for complex motors or actuation systems. There’s barely room for any electronics whatsoever, not to mention batteries, which is why robots that can swim inside your bloodstream or zip around your eyeballs are often driven by magnetic fields. However, magnetic fields drag around anything and everything that happens to be magnetic, so in general, they’re best for controlling just one single microrobot robot at a time. Ideally, you’d want robots that can swim all by themselves, and a robotic micro-scallop, announced today in Nature Communications, could be the answer.
When we’re thinking about robotic microswimmers motion, the place to start is with understanding how fluids (specifically, biological fluids) work at very small scales. Blood doesn’t behave like water does, in that blood is what’s called a non-Newtonian fluid. All that this means is that blood behaves differently (it changes viscosity, becoming thicker or thinner) depending on how much force you’re exerting on it. The classic example of a non-Newtonian fluid is oobleck, which you can make yourself by mixing one part water with two parts corn starch. Oobleck acts like a liquid until you exert a bunch of force on it (say, by rapidly trying to push your hand into it), at which point its viscosity increases to the point where it’s nearly solid.
These non-Newtonian fluids represent most of the liquid stuff that you have going on in your body (blood, joint fluid, eyeball goo, etc), which, while it sounds like it would be more complicated to swim through, is actually anopportunity for robots. Here’s why:
At very small scales, robotic actuators tend to be simplistic and reciprocal. That is, they move back and forth, as opposed to around and around, like you’d see with a traditional motor. In water (or another Newtonian fluid), it’s hard to make a simple swimming robot out of reciprocal motions, because the back and forth motion exerts the same amount of force in both directions, and the robot just moves forward a little, and backward a little, over and over. Biological microorganisms generally do not use reciprocal motions to get around in fluids for this exact reason, instead relying on nonreciprocal motions of flagella and cilia.
However, if we’re dealing with a non-Newtonian fluid, this rule (it’s actually a theorem called the Scallop theorem) doesn’t apply anymore, meaning that it should be possible to use reciprocal movements to get around. A team of researchers led by Prof. Peer Fischer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, in Germany, have figured out how, and appropriately enough, it’s a microscopic robot that’s based on the scallop:
As we discussed above, these robots are true swimmers. This particular version is powered by an external magnetic field, but it’s just providing energy input, not dragging the robot around directly as other microbots do. And there are plenty of kinds of micro-scale reciprocal actuators that could be used, like piezoelectrics, bimetal strips, shape memory alloys, or heat or light-actuated polymers. There’s lots of design optimizations that can be made as well, like making the micro-scallop more streamlined or “optimizing its surface morphology,” whatever that means.
The researchers say that the micro-scallop is more of a “general scheme” for micro-robots rather than a specific micro-robot that’s intended to do anything in particular. It’ll be interesting to see how this design evolves, hopefully to something that you can inject into yourself to fix everything that could ever be wrong with you. Ever.
