At the IEEE’s Virtual Reality 2010 conference
in Waltham, MA this week, researchers and companies are demonstrating technologies
that combine virtual reality and haptics.
Some of these technologies are designed for medical
rehabilitation. For example, a device made by Swedish company Curictus combines a haptic stylus from SensAble called the Phantom
Omni with a pair of virtual reality
glasses and monitor. The stylus moves freely on the mount, but becomes more or
less resistant depending on the user’s onscreen actions. In a demo at the
conference, I donned 3-D glasses and used the stylus to push virtual blocks around. The stylus pushed back when one block was pushed into another as it would in the real world. Pressing a button on the device and rotating a block
around produced the centripetal force, which I felt through the stylus.
This type of set-up can be used for rehabilitation. Turning exercises into a computerized game encourages patients to complete their exercises and keeps precise records of their performance, says Tommy Forsell at SenseGraphics, a company that provides open-source software for the combined device.
In another game, I used the stylus as a hammer to hit 3-D pop-up images. This game is designed to measure stroke patients’ response times and the accuracy of their actions.
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