https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-wet ... eless.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are becoming increasingly advanced, enabling increasingly engaging and immersive digital experiences. To make VR and AR experiences even more realistic, engineers have been trying to create better systems that produce tactile and haptic feedback matching virtual content.
Researchers at University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and other institutes in China have recently created WeTac, a miniaturized, soft and ultrathin wireless electrotactile system that produces tactile sensations on a user's skin. This system, introduced in Nature Machine Intelligence, works by delivering electrical current through a user's hand.
"As the tactile sensitivity among different individuals and different parts of the hand within a person varies widely, a universal method to encode tactile information into faithful feedback in hands according to sensitivity features is urgently needed," Kuanming Yao and his colleagues wrote in their paper. "In addition, existing haptic interfaces worn on the hand are usually bulky, rigid and tethered by cables, which is a hurdle for accurately and naturally providing haptic feedback."
WeTac consists of a series of electrodes, which are placed over a user's palm, and miniaturized soft electronic components that act as the device's control panel. When worn by users, the device can produce detailed and programmable spatio-temporal haptic feedback patterns, with 32 electrotactile simulation pixels on the side of the palm and high spatial resolution of 0.279 pixels per cm2 in the densest region.
"WeTac delivers current through the hand to induce tactile sensations as the skin-integrated haptic interface," the researchers wrote in their paper. "With a relatively high pixel density over the whole hand area, the WeTac can provide tactile stimulation and measure the sensation thresholds of users in a flexible way."
The device create by Yao and his colleagues has notable advantages over other electrotactile devices developed in the past. Most notably, it covers a wider surface of a user's hand (i.e., the whole hand), rather than focusing on one or more fingertips.
The processing will be distributed over three places in the upcoming OEM AR glasses (next year?). AR2 distributed SoC will be more efficient than the XR2 SoC, because it's produced on the TSMC's 4nm process, compared to the 7nm TSMC's process in the XR2 (similar to the Snapdragon 865) from 2020. It will also feature Wi-Fi 7 up to 5.8 Gbps, which is new. I wonder when we will see XR2 Gen2. It could be around twice as fast in graphics processing than the current XR2.
Townsmen VR from HandyGames reminds me of Black & White from Lionhead Studios, which is a concept that can work well in VR. I played Black & White in the early 2000s. Basically, you play god with ~medieval-level people.
