Disney Creates New Mid-Air Haptic Technology

An anonymous reader sends word of a new technology from Disney called AIREAL, featured at this year's SIGGRAPH 2013 conference in Anaheim, CA. It's designed to give tactile sensations to people who are using motion control devices. The device can track a target, like a user's hand, and send a compressed ring of air quickly through the intervening space to provide haptic feedback. They say the device is both inexpensive and scalable. Several of its parts are easily 3-D printed.

Comments

AIREAL + Oculus Rift would be amazing

[MSRedfox]

The idea of this mixed with an Oculus Rift would be amazing. We're getting close to the virtual reality they teased me with as a child.

The Only Market That Matters

[DexterIsADog]

Are there applications for interactive porn? I don't know how much push they can put in those air rings, but if it's enough to stimulate a penis, I say... blow me.

Re:3D Boobs

[Cryacin]

Great, so now dead space 4 will not only have nasties jumping out of the dark, but a gentle wisp of breathing on my neck as well.

I think the sales of adult diapers will be going through the roof.

Re:3D Boobs

[newcastlejon]

Never mind boobs, this thing will revolutionise blow jobs.

Re:3D Boobs

[gagol]

You know a blow job is not simply blowing air on a penis, right? There is a suction part missing to make it happens.

Re:3D Boobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the other end of the device.

Is there a way to make a REVERSE air puff?

[wisebabo]

I know that the context of this thread hardly lends itself to serious speculation but I was just wondering...

Since "puffs" of air are basically over-pressure waves in a medium, can an apparatus be made to make an "under" pressure wave? In air, or water or other mediums? Prurient applications aside there might be some useful applications (I used to work in the theme park industry so water shows come to mind). Maybe if a cavitation bubble (which I understand is an under-pressure volume) could be projected, it could be an effective underwater weapon (they damage propellers on ships and submarines). Perhaps an acoustic under-pressure wave could damage eardrums or supress audio (useful for crowd control). How about undersea trench laying for fiber optic cables?

Most likely though there is something about the non-linear response of under-pressure waves that would prevent them from being used in a practical application. Then my next question would be, did the Disney researchers try using a pressure wave shaped in a soliton? This might enable it to travel great(er) distances without losing its "shape". Or are solitons even possible in compressive versus transverse waves?

Wouldn't be the first time the porn industry helped accelerate the adoption of a whole industry! (VCRs).

Re:Is there a way to make a REVERSE air puff?

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr: You can't push on a rope, and nature abhors a vacuum.

You can easily create an underpressure wave by moving an object through a fluid. The region of underpressure follows behind the object, as the object has temporarily moved all the fluid out of the way. However, as soon as the object passes, the fluid rushes in to fill the underpressure region.

Acoustic overpressure (aka fucking loud sounds) destroys eardrums just fine. Any sound loud enough to shake the air back and forth to the point where bubbles of vacuum appear is already loud enough to cause damage.

Torpedoes destroy ships with an explosion followed by an imploding cavitation bubble. The hull may very well survive the initial explosion and shrapnel impact, but the explosion has pushed the water away from the ship's hull. The water rushes back into the resulting near-vacuum with peak pressure at impact. From the point of view of any hull-building material outside the realm of fiction, the overpressure from the collapsing bubble can be adequately described as "too much".

You cannot create an underpressure wave in the wake of nothing. If you generate a region of vacuum through cavitation (rapidly move two parallel plates apart in a fluid, or spin a propeller too quickly and have its tips move faster than the fluid's surface tension can hold together, or anger a mantis shrimp), the fluid immediately rushes in on the vacuum from all sides. Vacuums can only pull; they cannot push.

Powerful sonars can cause injury in animals caught within their beams (cf. whales with suspicious pressure-induced trauma) where the nulls in the sound waves hitting their body are basically vacuum. However, the nulls are caused by 210+ dB sound pressure levels piling up the fluid molecules around them. Just for fun, I tried to come up with an analogy for this kind of sound pressure level that sounds better than "standing a short distance from an explosion", but all I ended up with was sitting slightly inside the exhaust of a large modern turbofan engine with a three-piece rock band whose speakers and amps happen to be powered by the other three engines, and they're all having a nice heavy jam.

You can push on a rope if you can get the entire rope to start moving in the direction you want. So maybe instead of focusing on vacuum, you should focus on warping space-time. Or a pulley

Re:3D Boobs

[davester666]

Yeah, the part with the fan.