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Sculpting Interface Prototype
uw_dwarf writes "Now you can play with Play-Doh and your computer at the same time. Folks at the State University of New York at Buffalo have demonstrated another tactile interface to the computer: a glove with a sensor to determine pressure and direction in 3-space as the user works with a nice malleable substance. I'm torn between 'cool!' and 'scary!'"
Boy oh boy.
I remember getting an invite over to V.P.L. (Virtual Propulsion Laboratories) back when I had a friend who was working at nearby Oracle.
The demo: they had a virtual reality glove, something which you put your hand in and moved in free space to manipulate objects in virtual reality. Yeah, yeah, I know SUNYAB has made some incremental changes and added some haptic feedback, but please, VPL had started this in the pre-boom days of Silicon Valley back in the early 1990's.
"The Power Glove has to be one of the most innovative and least useful of all peripherals. R.O.B. may be more pointless from a gaming perspective, but there wasn't as much to R.O.B.
The Power Glove along with the sensors that were to be placed around your TV supposedly allowed you to control the game through virtual reality."
It seems some of you are confused as to what this is. From what I see, it using pressure sensors, and position sensors, combines them, and produces a 3D image (similar to one in a CAD program). This image can then be used later on, either to look at the object with out it being there, or to have as a design. This is not in any way the other way around. Virtual objects do not put FORCE on the GLOVE. You will not "feel" any thing from it. That would not work.
Lets look at this from a physics standpoint. It is a glove with wires coming out. There are no air bags to fill, no rockets to fire, and nothing to push your hand with. If you look at the picture you can see that. From this, we can assume the glove can not put force on your hand to move it. So no, VR sextoys, or objects won't really come from this.
What will come from this is faster design. A sculptor who is very good at making models in clay, may very well be horrible with CAD. They can model in real clay, using this glove, and it will make a CAD of the actual design he made. They can now mass produce exactly what he made. This basically flips the way they make cars around. From what I've seen, they model it, then make a clay mockup.
The actual clay... meaning you still have to have clay?
Yes. The whole point of this experiment is to produce better models of soft substances so that they can be used with _other_ types of interface realistically. The glove itself has no feedback characteristics - it's just a measuring device, telling the host computer what happens when you press *this* hard in *that* direction on the target substance (which among other things requires it to build an internal picture of what the current shape of the clay blob is).