You are standing in an apartment when you hear on the news that an earthquake has struck. Soon you feel your body sway and the ground starts to shake, the intensity increasing until the shelves on the walls and items on the table fall off.
For 10 seconds it stays that way, loud rumbling filling your ears, and you feel an immense urge to crouch down and hide. Then, as quickly as they came, the tremors gradually die out.
Upon taking off your headset, your turbulent surroundings dissipate and you find yourself back on safe and stable ground at NUS—thankfully.
Through the use of virtual reality (VR) technology and a vibrating platform, also known as a shake board, students will soon not only learn about earthquakes through slideshows but get to experience them too.
This is particularly eye-opening for students in Singapore where earthquakes are non-existent, said Associate Professor Feng Chen-Chieh from the Department of Geography.
The core team working on the headset is roughly 300 people, and Google plans to hire hundreds more. The executive overseeing the effort is Clay Bavor, who reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai and also manages Project Starline, an ultra-high-resolution video chat booth that was demoed last year.
I hope it has some VR capability, as I'd hate to see Facebook corner that market.
....
VR and AR are going to be wild in a couple years, given the improved VR and AR devices and then also all the Deep Learning advances. Videogame characters will seem to have a life of their own.
You walk along a dark winding path deep in a forest. There is a swamp you must wade through. You spot an old wooden shack and walk to it past a smoldering fire. Its broken shutters and verandah sag under vines and neglect.
And so begins your terrifying journey inside the dilapidated haunted house in Resident Evil 7, the survival horror virtual reality (VR) game.
You enter the rundown house through the only doorway not boarded over. Darkness. The door creaks closed behind you, then bangs shut. You turn on your torch…
Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets continue to make impressive strides in immersion and realism, particularly in visual and audio content. However, the delivery of rich tactile sensations continues to be a significant and open challenge. Critically, consumers want robust and integrated solutions – ones that do not require any extra devices or limit freedom of movement. For this reason, vibration motors in handheld controllers are the current consumer state of the art. While more sophisticated approaches exist (e.g., exoskeletons, haptic vests, body-cantilevered accessories, in-room air cannons), they have yet to see even modest consumer adoption.
Simultaneously, the mouth has been largely overlooked as a haptic target in VR/AR, despite being second in terms of sensitivity and density of mechanoreceptors, only behind the fingertips. Equally important, the proximity of the mouth to the headset offers a significant opportunity to enable on- and in-mouth haptic effects, without needing to run wires or wear an extra accessory. However, consumers do not want to cover their entire face, let alone put something up against (or into) their mouth. For AR, the industry is trending towards glasses-like form factors, so as to preserve as much facial expression as possible for human-human communication. Even in VR, smaller headsets are the consumer trend, with the mouth exposed and unencumbered.
In this research, we built a thin, compact, beamforming array of ultrasonic transducers, which could be integrated into future headsets in a practical and consumer-friendly way. We use this hardware to focus air-borne acoustic energy onto the lips and into the mouth, creating sensations such as taps and continuous vibrations, which we can also animate along arbitrary 3D paths. In addition to the lips, our effects can be felt on the teeth and tongue. When coupled with coordinated graphical feedback, the effects are convincing, boosting realism and immersion. We built a variety of sensory demos, including raindrops, mud splatter, pushing through cobwebs, and crawling bugs. While in-air haptics using ultrasonic phased arrays is not new, we are the first to integrate the technology into a headset for use on the mouth and explore the rich application space.
In this research, we built a thin, compact, beamforming array of ultrasonic transducers, which could be integrated into future headsets in a practical and consumer-friendly way. We use this hardware to focus air-borne acoustic energy onto the lips and into the mouth, creating sensations such as taps and continuous vibrations, which we can also animate along arbitrary 3D paths. In addition to the lips, our effects can be felt on the teeth and tongue. When coupled with coordinated graphical feedback, the effects are convincing, boosting realism and immersion. We built a variety of sensory demos, including raindrops, mud splatter, pushing through cobwebs, and crawling bugs. While in-air haptics using ultrasonic phased arrays is not new, we are the first to integrate the technology into a headset for use on the mouth and explore the rich application space.
An advanced version of this technology may be sufficient to recreate taste if the same air-borne acoustic energy from a different set of transducers gets simultaneously beamed to the olfactory receptors in the nose, I think.
