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Levitating Haptics Joystick Gives Good Feedback
SubComdrTaco writes "A controller developed at Carnegie Mellon University allows computer users to
manipulate three-dimensional images and explore virtual environments not only through sight and sound, but by using their sense of touch. It simulates a hand's responses to touch because it relies on a part that floats in a magnetic field rather than on mechanical linkages and cables, according to Ralph L. Hollis, a Carnegie Mellon professor who developed the controller.
The controller — like a joystick topped with a block that can be grasped — has just one moving part and rests in a bowl-like structure connected to a computer. Two of the controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up and move virtual objects on a monitor.
In a demonstration Tuesday, visitors to Hollis' lab were invited to move an image of a pin across a plate of various textures, causing the controller to bump along ripples, vibrate across fine striations and glide across smooth areas.
On one computer, users could "feel" the contours of a virtual rabbit.
Hollis said his researchers had built 10 of the devices, six of which were to be sent to other universities across the country and in Canada, and that a new company, Butterfly Haptics, would begin marketing the device in June or July.
The controller, which Hollis said will cost "much less" than $50,000, could enable a would-be surgeon to operate on a virtual human organ and sense the texture of tissue or give a designer the feeling of fitting a part into a virtual jet engine, or might also be used to convey the feeling of wind under the wings of unmanned military planes."
"Levitating Haptics Joystick Gives Good Feedback"
This has got to be the dirtiest headline Slashdot has ever written.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Well gee, that provides a lot of information.
Now I have hopes of only having to sell my car.
From the article:
I think we all know that this is a euphemism for pornography
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Possibly, but they'd have done better to just quote the article:
Somehow, I think this will have porn applications...
Professor Ralph Hollis now joins Hugh Hefner in being the only men in the world who make a living from feeling up bunnies.
Blank until
Or, we could blame everything on gravity. The same reasoning can conveniently be extended to any number of imagined causes. ;)