Virtual reality touch gets better with Fluid Reality’s new offering
The Fluid Reality glove uses haptic sensors to replicate touch in virtual reality more realistically. Photograph by Fluid Reality.
VR has been incorporated into video games for almost ten years, allowing users to wear goggles and fully engage themselves in environments that differ greatly from their actual environment.
Recently, tech behemoths like Meta and Apple have taken on these fresh facts, developing goggles like Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 that boost engagement and sense of realism with revolutionary technology.
However, as virtual worlds become more visual and acoustic, the sensation of touch has not kept up. Craig Schultz and Joe Mullenbach, researchers at Carnegie Mellon, were aware of this.
They realised that it would be challenging to provide a genuine sensation of feeling in a virtual reality setting as long as touch was reproduced via electromechanical techniques.
Thus, as part of their work at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute’s Future Interface Group, the two chose to use haptic sensors—a different technique for mimicking touch.
Oakland-based Fluid Reality was created by Schultz and Mullenbach, who received early business support from the Swartz Centre Entrepreneur Fellowship Programme and CMU’s Venture Bridge.
Their haptic sensors vary to provide touch sensations, much like the sensors on your smartphone or wristwatch. However, they differ in that they rely on liquid rather than mechanical components to perform their function.
According to Schultz and Mullenbach, one benefit of haptic sensors is their modest size (2 mm x 2 mm as opposed to 10 mm x 10 mm for electromechanical sensors), which allows for a variety of applications.
Mullenbach claims that the use of fluids also has the advantages of being less costly, using less energy, and allowing for the placement of the sensors in huge arrays—many fluid sensors may be installed in the same area as one electromagnetic sensor.
According to Mullenbach, traditional methods would not have allowed him and his colleagues to show 160 actuators on an arm at the Women in Science and Technology Conference held a few months back.
He says that trying to touch objects whilst using VR or AR will ruin the experience. Mullenbach said that anything scooped up digitally could not feel quite right.
He went on to explain that by putting 32 fluid actuators into every finger of a glove, they can show sensations on one’s fingers as they extend out to tap them.
Mullenbach claims that companies will deploy Fluid Reality sensors whenever they own anything that is pricey, hazardous, or challenging to get out of the way of.
Mullenbach says he’s already in talks with investors in Pittsburgh and possible customers, but he is hesitant to predict when his fluid-based haptic actuators will be on sale.
