I’ll be interested how they will implement the interactions framework with hands and eye gaze at that price point.
Meta’s hand / eye interaction stack is not great after several years.
Apple’s one looks ok, to be tested.
Better market it as a dumb screen and focus on visual clarity. A large 2D surface would go a long way in the market if done properly.
I strongly agree, the innovation needed is in haptics on the actuator side.
Can you expand on the static and low frequency? My impression was that if you're aiming for fingertips, higher frequency has more resolution. Iirc braille is mostly sensed by the vibration of the ridges of your fingerprint, when moving your finger over the dots. For this reason single character braille displays never really took off, you need an entire row (typically 40 characters) to make a usable refreshable braille display.
It's made with "standard" multilayer pzt actuators, with a displacement of 1000nm at 60V. That's apparently above the sensing threshold, but imho not enough for practical applications.
I am curious about the fabrication methods though. The 1mm actuators are in a checkerboard pattern, and apparently reflow soldered. I'm curious how they did that while staying below the curie temperature of the actuators (typically <150°C for PZT), and if that is mechanically sufficient.
Perceptual modes are specific mechanical stimuli we learned to recognize as specific sensations.
Some of them are: stiffness which is skin indentation and tendons strain in function of space, vibrations which is skin indentation in function of time for frequency above 10/20 hz.
These modes resides a bit on the neurophysiology of touch (how mechanoreceptors respond) and a bit on how we learned to recognize touch sensations.
The problem reside that the first thing you want to do is manipulate, not simply touch.
Manipulation is a bitch because it mostly needs small indentation of the skin which are 1-3 mm of continuous displacement at 1 mm resolution under the fingertip.
They piezo they are using displaces 1 mm at the resonance frequency, I imagine 150 hz (I believe?) or something similar, not in continuous (again, I believe).
Which means that a contact on the sensor is rendered as a local vibration, which requires a lot of mental gymnastic to think of it as a contact.
That is the haptic metaphor. Basically you expect an indentation and you get a vibration, and this sucks and for users.
If they got it in static displacement that is cool and might be something noteworthy
Displacement is 1000nm, so 3 orders of magnitude less than 1mm. As for frequency response, looks like they tested up to 1000Hz. I see no reason why it wouldn't work at any frequency from 0Hz up to 1000Hz, and even higher. But because the displacement is so small you really need the higher frequencies to be able to sense the actuation.
That's just piezo's, you need to stack several layers to get a usual displacement. You do get high force, so they're typically used for high precision positioning.
I've been looking at piezo bimorph actuators as used in braille displays. Because they're cantilevered you're trading displacement for force (and size). That could perhaps be used to create a high resolution array with enough displacement at low frequency. Not really wearable like a glove, but certainly portable.
This is fun, I do haptics for a living and I would have never expected to have something to say here.
The way around the seat shaking problem is to use wideband vibrotactile actuators tuned to respond between 10 and 250 Hz on different part of the body. They can be embedded is seat or on a vest.
The mechanical energy transfer is local, can be tuned individually, and consumes much less energy.
There are also several successful products leveraging this principle like the Razer Hypersense line, feel belt, and others.
A recent company acquired by Meta, Lofelt, started their tech doing exactly this.
If you want to jump into the haptics rabbit hole, I animate a podcast [0] with some industry folks. Fascinating topics.
I make Techno. I would like to "feel" the sub in a way that doesn't require me to have a subwoofer. I know of things like Subpac but they don't sell them anymore. Do you know of anything else like this or if it is relatively easy to make one?
I'd check out the Woojer Strap/Vest [0] or maybe the ButtKicker [1] from the article if you're ok with being seated. I have stereo ButtKicker Concerts on my couch and they're awesome.
The Strap 3 is marketed for music listening, so I would imagine it would be workable? I've yet to try any of their stuff, though. The appeal seems to be around ease of use, and the targeted chest vibrations.
And the ButtKickers are purely mechanical, so no DSP. I would steer towards their Concert line as it's meant specifically for music, whereas the LFE has a stronger response from 20-30hz for home theater type applications.
I wrote few of these algorithms myself for some other products.
There is always a trade off between fidelity and immersive feeling because the basses were not meant to be used with such product in mind.
With my company, Interhaptics, we built a full stack pipeline only for haptics. Our tech is at the basis of the MPEG haptics encoding standard coming out shortly.
We have been recently acquired by Razer, look out for news of you are interested to build for touch natively
Quite easy to build.
The problem is to get ahold of the parts.
Get a well know console controller, take out the two actuators and mount them in any other form factors you like.
You can drive them with an audio pipeline, they are effectively a 4 ohm speaker. Attach them to a sound card and you can have your stereo haptics subwoofers.
You have to filter out aggressively the resonance frequency of the actuator to get a flattish response. Not that subpac or the other folks do so
