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Way back in 1996 at Siggraph, I tried out a "haptic pen". It was a little pen on the end of an articulated robot arm. You held it like a normal pen and moved it
by munificent 4y ago
Way back in 1996 at Siggraph, I tried out a "haptic pen". It was a little pen on the end of an articulated robot arm. You held it like a normal pen and moved it around in 3D space. The robot arm would give you force feedback based on where the tip was in space. It was strong enough to completely stop the pen.
In the demo they had set up, there was a 3D model of a car, and you slide the tip of the pen along the surface. The haptic feedback would stop the pen from penetrating into the model so it really felt like the tip was touching the volume of a solid.
Super cool experience.
- iamevn 4y agoThis sounds like it inspired a video game controller called the Novint Falcon. Swappable grip on the end of 3 arms that could detect up/down/left/right/forward/back movement and also had decently beefy motors to give you that sort of feedback. I was super impressed by the demo software that has a part where you moved a virtual hand through various substances. Honey and molasses really felt like you were moving your hand through viscous liquid, you could feel the texture of a bumpy rock but not move through it, and most impressive to me was a sphere of ice that really felt like your hand easily slid along the surface. It got first party support in a bunch of Valve games and a decent number of games had unofficial support through mods but it never really took off and I think the company now makes medical tools with the same sort of tech. The lack of feedback in input devices beyond a little rumble is really disappointing. I think feedback is extremely important especially now that VR is starting to actually take off.
- elil17 4y agoFeedback is just hard to do. There are safety concerns (anything with powerful enough feedback is strong enough to hurt you if it malfunction). It’s also pretty expensive because you need a bunch of servos and force transducers which add up as you add DOF.
- gmueckl 4y agoWas this pen on an arm later commercialized as the Phantom Omni?
- munificent 4y agoI have no idea. This was a quarter century ago. :D
- Findecanor 4y agoSounds like it. I worked for a few months building demos for the "SensAble Phantom" (not Omni). It was limited in that it gave force-feedback only against the sphere at the tip. The orientation of the pen could not be restricted. We attempted to simulate feedback on more DOF through leverage, but it was lacking: like using a mouse to simulate a steering wheel in a driving game.
- mepian 4y agoSounds like the perfect sculpting experience if you combine it with modern VR.
- munificent 4y agoYeah, 3D modeling was the use case they were demoing it for. It was really impressive.
- javiramos 4y agoSensable Technologies, an MIT spinout, developed the technology. The company was acquired by 3D Systems (https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics) Note that Thomas Massie, US representative and climate change denialist, was the founder of Senseable.
- munificent 4y agoAh, cool. This looks like a related paper: https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/647/434/a_framework_for_fast_and_accurate_collision_detection_for_haptic.pdf https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/647/434/a_framework_fo... The conclusion reminded me of an interesting point they mentioned during the demo: the haptic feedback ran at 1,000 FPS! We have much finer-grained expectations around time for touch than we do sight.
- chrisweekly 4y ago"climate change denialist" is such a disturbing and dismaying characteristic for someone who should know better