Introduction and haptic technology
The latest virtual reality headsets offer 360 degree video that reacts to your motion. Seeing yourself interacting with a different reality is awesome, but it's only a start – we all experience the world using five senses, namely sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Neurologists identify many more within the senses; for example, your skin can detect heat, cold, pain and pressure – and there are many more.
The conclusion? That virtual reality head-mounted displays like Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and HTC Vive are basic, dumb devices that concentrate only on sight. What virtual reality needs to be at all convincing is haptic technology – the science of touch.
What is haptic technology?
Virtual reality is too passive; seeing your surroundings is only immersive in the most basic sense. To truly believe you're there – a virtual reality – requires a physical dimension. This is haptic technology, the science of touch, and it's a blend of software and hardware. Apple has tried it in a basic sense with its Taptic Engine, which powers the Force Touch ability of the Apple Watch's vibrating notifications, and the trackpads of its latest MacBook Pro line-up.
That's definitely a start, but what virtual reality really needs is physical feedback. That's exactly what a team at the Human Computer Interaction lab of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany has been working on with 'impacto', a device designed to mimic the sensation of hitting, and being hit, in a virtual reality. It's time to get our boxing gloves on.
How does impacto work?
A small, self-contained, wireless and eminently wearable device, impacto is all about both tactile and electrical muscle simulation. If you're hit during a VR game, for example, impacto will tap your skin and add impulse by using electrical muscle stimulation to thrust your arm backwards. Keppow!
"Impacto is designed to emulate the sensation of something colliding with you, like being hit or hitting something," says computer scientist Pedro Lopes, a PhD student at the Human Computer Interaction lab, who describes it as offering only a special category of touch. "Impacto certainly adds a realism to virtual reality, such as when you are immersed in a sport simulator," he says, offering juggling a football as an example. "It's fundamentally different from only seeing (the ball) … we added a sense of impact."
Could it work on other body parts?
Absolutely; impacto – which operates wirelessly and on battery power – is modular and works well for other parts of the body. "We have developed impacto to demonstrate the future of post-wearable devices that connect directly to the human body, in this case to the muscles," says Lopes. "We have demonstrated it attached to not just the biceps in the boxing simulator, but also to the calves for a soccer ball juggling simulator, and to the wrist muscles in a baseball simulator." There's a great demo on YouTube here.
Embracing more senses and the MetaverseWhy can't virtual reality embrace more senses?
While adding a sense of touch or physical feedback is technically possible, as proved by Lopes, haptic technology is in its very early stages. So while we will see more and more 'sense experiences' being simulated by future iterations of VR headsets, it's going to take some time to refine and shrink the technology.
"Most of the feelings that relate to touch are hard to emulate without using large robotic installations, which are expensive and not mobile – we developed impacto to simulate the sense of impact at a wearable and mobile form factor," says Lopes, who nevertheless thinks we will see more and more senses being researched by the community.
Other projects that Lopes and colleague Lung-Pan Cheng are involved with include Muscle Propelled Force Feedback, which simulates pushing/pulling forces, and Haptic Turk, a complete motion platform.
"The future certainly holds more developments, but one can only speculate at this point," says Lopes, "but I'm excited to see haptic illusions around temperature!" Virtual reality will one day be able to mimic a sense of heat and humidity as well as touch, but by then the humble headset – dealing only with sight and sound – will be but one component.
Is touch really that important?
Not everyone thinks so. "The current findings indicate that a sense of touch isn't necessary to feel 'presence' when in VR," says David Haynes, a specialist in 3D mapping and virtual reality who created an Oculus Rift game based on Scottish mountain Ben Nevis using Ordinance Survey mapping data.
"The extremely low latency visual stimulation seems to be enough in the vast majority of people," he adds, citing the obvious analogy with cinema, which has offered just visual and audio for many years. "We've never needed to add an olfactory – smell – component to that for people to suspend their disbelief," he says, though he admits that anything that adds to the feeling of immersion whilst using VR will help people's sense of presence.
Why is Facebook interested in virtual reality?
When it bought Oculus VR for $2 billion (around £1.3 billion, AU$2.8 billion) in 2014, Facebook took many by surprise. Why would a social media platform be so interested in a headset that offers 360 degree video? The answer is not in the first-gen version of Oculus Rift, but in the vision of the company's founders, John Carmack and Michael Abrash. "They wanted to build the Metaverse – a concept popularised in the Neal Stephenson book 'Snowcrash' – since working together on Quake in the 1990s," says Haynes.
What is a Metaverse?
"The Metaverse is a communal virtual social space where people can meet, chat and share experiences – there are obvious parallels with that, and social media in its current form, that Facebook are obviously very interested in," says Haynes.
Virtual reality for Facebook may also be about giving everyone the best seat in the house. "Manchester United selling the best seat in the house to every one of their supporters around the world, who could watch at home as if they were inside Old Trafford, would be worth significantly more to them than the current Sky and BT TV deals," says Haynes. Think truly immersive sports, live concerts and cinema, all attended virtually via Facebook.
Can Oculus Rift deliver a Metaverse?
Oculus Rift, which is due out in early 2016, won't deliver a Metaverse. Not even close. But it's easy to see why Facebook is excited in the long-term. "I can imagine the potential of connecting many users with each other in virtual experiences that go beyond typing texts in each other's profiles and sending messages," says Lopes. "Perhaps a more meaningful way of interacting by seeing each other in a rather more immersive version of video conferencing."
When that happens, says Lopes, there will be a flood of interest in simulating impact, forces, motion, heat and even smell – and then we'll have arrived at virtual reality technology that's worthy of the name.
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Original source: Let's get physical: Why proper virtual reality needs to incorporate touch.
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