SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to enable the creation of new consumer products that incorporate tactile fingertip sensing and tactile fingertip display, thereby bridging the digital divide and having a positive impact on society. One application is touch-enabled content sharing, which will let users download and feel objects that are beyond the reach of most people, such as a stone from the moon or a newborn lion cub. The envisioned technology will also have immediate relevance for consumers by enabling a richer e-commerce experience, where buyers not only see but also can touch what they plan to purchase. Other likely commercial impacts are to improve gaming and virtual reality systems, to add interpersonal touch communication to video chat applications, and to capture and analyze surface properties for industrial applications such as remote materials characterization and product inspection. This project will also provide insights on how currently available consumer electronic components can be used to enable next-generation computer interfaces and wearable tactile devices that enable unhindered use of the human finger.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to enable high quality tactile communication between two human beings across time and distance, essentially to make it possible to feel what another person is touching across the digital divide. The research team will address the essential questions of (1) how to record what the fingertip feels when touching a broad range of surfaces and (2) how to convincingly replicate these diverse tactile sensations for another individual to feel. The intellectual merit of this project lies with the strong research team and the focus on next generation haptic technologies that combine several different tactile input data types and output modalities, rather than just a single sensation type. Specific contributions of this work will include the design of a wearable sending unit that accurately captures the broad-bandwidth experience of natural touch-based interactions with real object surfaces and the design of a stationary receiving unit that re-creates these sensations at the fingertip of another person. Determining the efficacy of this approach will improve society?s understanding of the way in which humans process certain types of tactile signals and will advance scientific knowledge of human tactile interactions.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to create a suite of consumer hardware and software products that provide realistic tactile feedback to users who are touching objects in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). As evidenced by the current proliferation of low-cost head-mounted displays and motion tracking systems, three-dimensional interaction technologies are revolutionizing how people interact with computers, media, and each other. Since they are currently limited to vision and audio, endowing consumer-level human-computer interfaces with high-fidelity tactile feedback will vastly increase user immersion, making games more fun, online interactions more effective, and tools more efficient. Consequently, this project has the potential to expand the commercial reach of the burgeoning VR/AR market, opening up myriad opportunities for companies particularly in the gaming, entertainment, and e-commerce sectors. The innovation of this project also promises to enhance scientific and technological understanding of haptic human-computer interaction by establishing a new paradigm that blends minimal wearable hardware with sophisticated software algorithms. Finally, commercializing novel interactive technology also has the potential to help inspire a diverse array of young people to pursue a career in the critical areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project aims to advance knowledge of low-cost technology that can provide realistic tactile feedback to a user touching objects in VR or AR: the project?s intellectual merits center on testing a new approach that combines minimal haptic hardware and sophisticated software algorithms. The research objective is to create a fully functional industrial prototype of a wearable fingertip thimble and custom software that embody the proposed approach. When the user's finger moves to touch a virtual object, a platform inside the thimble will initiate contact with the fingerpad and press with a force that varies with penetration distance, to render surface softness. A thermal actuator will convey the object?s thermal conductivity and temperature. When the finger slides along a virtual object, the user will feel its texture via carefully designed platform vibrations. Specific research tasks to be addressed include exploring haptic actuator options, building a library of haptic object properties (HOPs) that can be applied to virtual objects, and creating a communication protocol for exchanging haptic signals among devices. This project is expected to yield a fully functional industrial prototype and developer kits for the wearable fingertip thimble.