HaptX gloves provide high-fidelity touch feedback of virtual spaces
freethink.com
freethink.com
The force feedback is driven with a complex exotendon (cable) system that can give dynamic resistance as well as just pulling on you.
The tactile haptics are much more interesting. It's a grid of piston actuators in several places along the palm and fingers. They need the huge backpack and separate gigantic floor unit with a compressor to generate the pressure required to push those pistons fast and hard enough.
They also have their own hand and finger tracking. It's actually a pretty cool system.
As an engineer, I respect the hell out of what they're doing. The haptics really are the best thing on the market right now. Unfortunately the cost is so high and the use case so narrow that it just isn't worth it.
So far, VR haptics has really only found use in training and simulation. There's real potential there, but it's a very small market right now. But we do see that it genuinely does help shorten training times when we convince someone to use it.
The problem is latency. Your actuator needs to be able to move from 0 to 100% actuation within a half second or so. Ideally as fast as possible. If there's significant delay between visually seeing your hand contact an object and feeling the haptics, it becomes worse than useless.
To make pneumatic actuators go really fast, you need a lot of pressure. The reason the HaptX system is so big is that they have dozens of individual actuators. You need a lot of valves, which is what's in the backpack. The compressor is a separate unit that sits on the floor. It's also huge.
But this is very much an area of active research. There's a lot of interesting actuators out there. Overall, people seem to be moving away from pneumatics because the cost and complexity is so high.
Another comment mentioned that these gloves have an application in NN training. Warehouse workers could wear the exoskeleton “bottoms” while providing training data for manipulating various objects.
Besides, I don't think that training a neural network on hand motions is actually that useful. What you're talking about is a kinematics problem that is totally tangential. You'd want the robot to understand how to manipulate objects, not hands, and not a human body. Watching how a human moves doesn't tell you how a robot moves. The neural network would need to learn how to manipulate arbitrary objects with a robot body. Capturing human motion doesn't help much.
You want pressure and force information too, for helping train the robot to be dextrous.
like, have you found if a slight counter-pressure makes for a more significant/faster feeling physical pressure?
We will probably need millions of hours of data of robots doing everyday tasks to train our neural net models. Collecting that data might mean humans puppeteering robots very precisely but also very quickly. Without haptic gloves, human operators would be attempting tasks with no sense of touch at all, and their movements would be unnatural and inefficient, ultimately resulting in the trained robot moving inefficiently too.
Tesla has a motion capture suit that can be seen here: https://youtu.be/XiQkeWOFwmk?t=33 In this video they aren't doing teleoperation but in this other video demonstrating teleoperation you can briefly see a hand in the bottom right corner which looks like it could be wearing a haptic glove: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1746964887949934958
A Systematic Review of Commercial Smart Gloves: Current Status and Applications
(weblink) https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/8/2667
(pdf link) https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/sensors/sensors-21-02667/a...
About 2 decades ago, I visited an international school for the blind to talk about technology needs and this was at the top of their list. A lot of blind people would like to be engineers, but they lack the ability to use CAD to be competitive in industry.
A glove for more interactivity would be a lot more difficult and expensive but really cool :)
I want to buy one anyway, even if it's $20,000.
[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/amazing-sensitiv...
There is no use case for HaptX. They're not a substitute for anything. They're not magically precise. They're nothing.
The industry has really only found use in training so far. But it's pretty promising in my opinion.
As to efficacy, I don't know if there have been rigorous studies yet, the industry is still pretty new. But anecdotally we do see that users build better muscle memory that reduces training time with real world equipment.
The idea is generally to have users do their first round of training virtually instead of with real equipment. Then they require less time with the real equipment and don't make newbie mistakes that break things.
You'd be surprised at just how poor quality the haptics can be and still be convincing. VR has some interesting psychological effects that make your perception of the haptics much better than it actually is. What you see can actually override your proprioception to a large enough degree that we can get away with not being so precise.
To me the biggest problem outside of that was that the system can't really provide the sense of touch of a static object. Like resting your hands on the thorns of a cactus. Because it uses streams of air bubbles, it has to be a continuously changing surface, so rubbing your hand or finger on something works better.
Is it more immersive? Yeah, to a point. I personally think that a feedback system that let you feel the volume or shape of gripped objects would be better, but these are very hard problems.
One can imagine fanciful solutions, but people tend to get hurt in VR space. It would be very, very hard not injure the humans in meat space with tech that is sufficiently rigid to let them also physically interact with vr objects.
I can't imagine it working perfectly. Say, pulling a book out of a shelf should have exactly zero resistance (other than the force of gravity pulling the book down). Having near zero latency between action and the 'tactile interface' moving in exactly the right direction would be a very hard problem...
Seated is kind of stupid imo.
The active force applied to the fingers is actually pretty small. The geometry of a flexed hand gives huge mechanical advantage. The key is a large holding force. It's easy to prevent you from closing your hands further without needing to actually overpower you.
You don't need to pull hard, you just have to be able to stop hard. No real risk there.
> the system can't really provide the sense of touch of a static object.
Yeah, that's hard because of how you perceive weight. We'd have to be able to pull your forearm down relative to the elbow, and that's not exactly easy to do elegantly. I've thought a lot about it and haven't been able to come up with something that isn't a ridiculous exoskeleton for your arms and shoulders.
> I personally think that a feedback system that let you feel the volume or shape of gripped objects would be better, but these are very hard problems.
I agree! It really does make the interaction more convincing. I've been working on this problem for the last year or so and it is indeed quite hard. But we're nearly there. Maybe this year ;)