How Haptics Will Change the Way We Interact With Machines
Commentary: Hmmm…VR 2.0 on steroids?
Force-feedback exoskeleton gloves, remote-control surgical robots, touchscreens and video games that touch back—tactile technology is taking off. Popular Mechanics’s Resident Roboticist shakes hands with a virtual world.
The term “joystick” seems a bit frivolous for the device in front of me, but there it is, an interface that hearkens back to the days of Pac Man and Donkey Kong. Yet this joystick is special—a highly evolved example of a technology that is changing the way humans interact with machines. I’m in the Microdynamic Systems Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the interface I’m looking at is properly called a magnetic levitation haptic device. The apparatus is built into a bowl-shaped indentation in a table; its plastic joystick sits in the midst of brightly colored red and blue magnet arrays. As I reach inside the basin to palm the handle, the device hums and shivers almost imperceptibly.
Source: Popular Mechanics
