hey everybody's going from Testim it's Jeremy from Testim welcome back to
projections we're this week haptics the sense of touch is the topic I've been
saying that haptics is like the next frontier since we got our VR headsets I
really think that that's going to be the thing that makes this world seem real
maybe I read too much ready player one yeah well that's something we definitely
want yeah right we feel like even the vibration controllers gives us some
sense of contact right but we want something that's more directly
correlated to the forces exactly all in the real world we've seen a bunch of
different implementations from gloves you wear to things that have actuators
that push give you resistance yes for your individual fingers right and it's a
tough problem to solve a problem with that is that you can push through things
no matter how much force they apply it's not like they stop your hand yeah it
would be very dangerous if anything that's true that's true but there's they
physically can't either and yes you're gonna push through things any kind of
glove that gives you that sensation so you have to sort of work with it it's
not much more than a rumble and it really any sense of it well company
working against the grain with haptics is working with not forces that push
against you and give you resistance right but shear forces right so that's
like if you take something against your skin and you move it across your skin
it's the stretching of your skin lateral it's friction yeah essentially which if
you think about it you feel kind of everywhere whether you're rubbing your
hands gots a table it might not be much but it's something there or if you're
holding a physical and controller and you're moving anything you're gonna feel
the weight of the object actually right move against your skin because it has
weight and the nice thing about that force that you can simulate is that is
this constant 'no siz like it can be heavy and it is constantly there no
matter where it you move in space and it can just sort of you can simulate that
no in a way that i feel like it's more compelling the company's called tactical
haptics and was started by a researcher who done a lot of research into shear
forces in the lab and has developed these custom controllers that can adapt
to like oculus tracking or CVR tracking and they're the really unique looking
controllers in fact let's let him explain how this works
everybody norm here at Augmented World Expo and we met will here
who runs tactical haptics you guys have an interesting hectic solution with
their own design controller that tell me about the concept because this gives
force feedback in a way we've never seen before right so in a nutshell when you
interact with the world it's composed of kinesthetic those outside forces
emotions in tactile and the way we wear this works is we create Tac Toe
illusions by capturing your kinesthetic emotion and then responding with the
dominant Tac Toe which happens to be a shear of frictional forces within the
grip of the controller by moving these little plates so there are two plates
here on each of these controllers one as you grab it one for the cliff where your
fingers are and one for where your palm is and your how much shear force is
really moving them vertically and with the combination of that how much do they
move a couple millimeters up couple millimeters down that can give the
illusion of what type of force is so you experience it it's everything from
elasticity and inertia to impacts and resistance you know bring your your VR
experiences to life real force feedback resistance is the one that makes the
most sense to me I think in a demo I was holding what looks like a rod and I
think about when I lift something heavy it should there should be something up
pushing against my hand and so you're slowly moving these plates that makes
sense how much like how fast did they have to move to similarly the different
type of forces it's a great question I've never they thought about like the
speed the most important thing is that they do it on time to have really low
latency so it's the same thing if you're you've been covering the VR stuff for a
while oculus use their mantra was motion to photons right it's like 20
milliseconds was their magic numbers it's the same thing for your touch
system the same thing that you know like you have to fool this to make it feel
like it's on time well the main thing that we've been
focusing in on is having these things respond quickly meaning that we go from
where you're actually being tracked into the physics simulation and back out into
the simulated forces and then the internal forces that are applied via
these little slide points and you're you creating profiles based on the
simulation you make certain things weight is supposed to feel a certain way
that Cal then is associated with a certain type of movement here so yes and
no so knowing that it's actually simpler than that if you know how to
make a physics simulation which game developer knows how to take stuff from
unity or unreal make it really simple physics simulation with some masses and
Springs and they know the compute forces might if you know to compute that force
it doesn't matter what's causing that force if it's caused from a mass moving
through space it'll feel like weight because that your brain is used to
experiencing forces as a function of its universal variable right and if it's a
spring you're used to it it probably linearly increasing in terms of force we
also maps to linear increasing shear while you're moving through space so all
these things are just model as physics simulations give us a force vector that
then we map into how would the friction be applied if this external force was
there and so your caliber is all in mapping that vectors of friction so
that's right it's really simple it's it's there's way less here than meets
the eye it's it's meant to be simple and it's meant to be into it because these
are the same friction forces you experience all the time
when you're doing everyday things around whether you're shoveling or you're using
a pen you're used to these friction forces you you're so used to them when
you don't actually have the physical resistance added to the ATO the outside
on the controller you're used to these friction forces then integrating into
what feels like a kinesthetic event you know a resistance as opposed to like
stuff moving around in my hand now you told us you have a background in
research and is this where the idea came out of and what were those lessons from
the research like is sheer force enough in fact you and the research scenario it
actually started off that we used it for Direction cues and later mapped it into
like a substitution for forces or somebody to come compliment forces but
we weren't really substituting we weren't really complementing it was
really just kind of creating these illusions that really shouldn't exist
and it was the discovery that these solutions could exist without external
forces just with internal forces is really the magic of makes what makes it
work so there's no plans to combine it with other types of haptics or does that
even ruin the illusion no actually it's funny because we were doing some stuff
in the medical side we were using little robot devices like there's a device
called the phantom has a little stylus memories we had a stylish form factor
for a while and we were all menteng with that with a little bit of sheer feedback
and the interesting thing is is that you know it made everything feel a lot
stiffer when you augment it with a little shear feedback and then we did
this little trick where we turn off the force feedback and they'd only have the
shear feedback and they say you can turn off the force feedback now just because
they were so automatically interpreting it as forces right so the answer I guess
to your question is you don't need anything else you could use it to
compliment force feedback and it makes it even better but in the case where you
don't wanna have big have a bigger robotic arm coming up from the ground
and I want this in the consumer space and I want to be able to walk an
infinite hallway as long as I can track myself you can give compelling force
like feedback mmm the other innovation years are doing or the way these two
controllers interact with each other you talk about that magnet system in the
mounting system sure maybe I'll just do this so what we did was we we focused on
ability to do what you want in the game at the moment you want to do it and a
lot of people will have separate controllers and they're continuously
holding their vibe or the touch controllers up here and they're driving
a car but it turns out like if you just have a very simple magnetic connection
it's not permanent it's easy to take apart but this creates this embodiment
effect that this now feels like a different object to me just the same way
that this could feel like a different object and rather than hovering around
now it's a single solid object and the way you interpret the feedback from it
is you know inherits that embodiment effect so if it feels like a big hefty
machine gun it feels like a more cumbersome wheel that I'm turning and
then you can give the feedback that transforms that experience at the same
time that corresponds with that new peripheral and and how many poses have
you figured out so you can do with all these magnets standard game pad machine
gun right-handed or left-handed there's kind of top to top so this would be like
I'm motorcycle bicycle on a motorcycle or a snowmobile this would be like the
throttle that's one of the other cool things about here would be like a pull
are more like I'm like bear in a parade that's probably the most boring you
could go bottom to vomits a little bit cumbersome but you could do that you
could go into the side here this would be like I'm going and turning opening a
for instance this would be wonder twin powers I don't know how many posters are
but you know six seven right right the very versatile the actuators themselves
are those like is that the smack strength is there a room for growth
there you guys iterating on that so we've kind of iterate this is kind of
like a happy medium we actually limit the forces because we don't want to hurt
people there's it's it's kind of like the art of the the good enough and
having it so that is responsive but not able to produce forces that you know
might pinch somebody and hurt somebody and create a bad experience so it's it's
a balance right now it's applying a couple pounds of force and where do you
hope to see this in the marketplace so our entry actually we just open up pre
first yesterday coincidentally we're initially focused on enterprise and
that's anything from training for businesses whether it's medical or a
maintenance crew we have just general people doing R&D I'm like why does the
solution work that are interesting this as well but obviously in the gaming
space and for us it's partnering with the VR integrators so that going out to
the arcades and creating these wonderful experiences that you can't have at home
very cool thank you so much at all it's a pleasure mission okay Jeremy so I
don't know if the video accurately captured how we felt when we're using
demos because they're a bunch of demos that we were put through right to
experience the sheer forces on their grips you know I'm using the vibe
controllers here as an example but the idea is that basically on the front and
the back where your hands grab there are these pads that move up and down right
yeah these grow these pads that have ridges in them that can more or less
grip your hands and so when you're climbing a rope they might move up a
little bit and they might pull down and it doesn't take much to because you're
holding the controller you're exerting your own force to keep your hands
connected to the controller doesn't take much for that to actually cause a
sensation of not pain or anything but it is definitely a strong sensation this is
not a weak feedback device like some of the pressure-sensitive things that we've
used before even like Rumble and also like unlike Rumble whereas Rumble is
instantaneous and can sort of do a repetitive thing this
is constant and also like perfectly synced to the action that's on screen
I think the sinc game was what the big takeaway was how it's convincing because
if you're just holding the controller and feeling the actuators move yeah
I'm not convinced that that is any type of thing I'm holding or any type of
action but once I was paired with a crossbow narrow and pulling it back and
the thing I think I liked the most was part of the mace I'm holding a mace and
swing in as the heavy virtual ball of the mace is moving up and down us
feeling the handle almost loosen and tighten my grip as you say that to me
like I'm thinking as and as a viewer it actually doesn't mean I'd almost don't
believe you because there's these two things that
are moving like this yeah on your controller how in the world does that
map to this and yet it was so it really feels good and it's so whatever math
they're doing that's part of the secret sauce it's not just getting these things
to move it it's actually making a movement sensation or making these two
things do the appropriate thing are they in sync together are they offset is the
timing different and making that sync up with whatever the motion is on-screen is
part of the magic and one of the neat things about that demo is when you would
put the mace down yes it would release the tension you would feel like there
was a lighter the thing you were holding was lighter though no weight is actually
chained right it's it's all about the relative sensation of your pads on your
your your hand and the also the cool thing is that they don't need to design
the feedback for each individual item it's just physics right right so then as
long as they've calibrated for the weight of certain objects that I know
you're holding things that are either like they're gripped right like a grip
of a pistol in the grip of a a pole or mace or a rope like they can simulate
any of this thing and it works equally well for those kind of pulse sensations
that we would traditionally get from rumble or linear actuators like a firing
a gun like it does that perfectly well too but it's those forces that are
constant where if you lift something heavy or like we had a gravity gun where
we would pointed at a small cube and move it around and we had the same kind
of sensation you could feel the difference between the small and a big
cube it just felt heavier because as you lifted it up it took longer for
these to fall into position it's neat I mean I I came away really really
surprised because there's a lot of people trying new things in haptics and
a lot of new technologies at awwe in particular and this was a small booth in
the back of one of the darker halls and I win like this is probably my favorite
haptic experience that I've had yeah and the other thing that they designed this
controller is this magnetic system for interlocking yeah controllers which also
is a whole other tech that is independent of haptics but also makes
sense for VR controller it is definitely cool
because it allows you to position them in ways that lend themselves to various
types of controllers this isn't necessarily something that's exclusive
to a haptic solution this would be great for VR controllers in general like AI
that kind of makes me surprised that one of the other majors haven't come up with
some kind of solution that does this out of the box because it's a lot easier to
like make handles that could be a steering wheel but that locked together
immortal song if there's a system or you know people who play FPS games would
love to handed yes some sort of perfect like two-handed system it makes a lot of
sense for them yeah we don't know when or how this is gonna be a consumer
product but they definitely want to productize it it may not be for the home
but maybe for places like L bees where people can invest in the types of
controllers and one interesting that we don't follow up is we're wondering
whether just one axis of sheer force because it is only currently one yeah is
that you get any extra benefit from you know two axis or multiple axis of
movement and the answer is in the research absolutely but in terms of
making a product one axis was enough and for our demo absolutely enough totally I
was surprised it was only moving a few millimeters yeah it felt like a couple
centimeters like it it cause it's they said that they had to rein it in so that
it doesn't cause a painful sensation so that tells me that like it doesn't take
much movement at all and there they have plenty of lateral space in order to
create the sensations that they need I mean your hands are where you have most
of your nerves right so you should be able to feel all those subtle different
to be clear it doesn't it is not a virtual reality controller itself it's
not a tract controller it has its own IMU in there but they have attachments
so that you connect any off-the-shelf controller
from ocular survived and so it is a accessory for VR controller so keep an
eye out for that company tactical optics and we hope it pops up in place that we
can use it for experiences soon before we go we want talk about one game a
recommendation that both up and playing this is a game called free diver and I
know you talked to Jeremy about loving different locomotion mechanics yeah this
is a very unique locomotion mechanic locomotion for me is paramount like when
I get in the VR what I want is a sensation of moving through the world
that I can't do in real life or that if I did I'd probably be very very scared
and low Necco gives me that the echo games do you know jet island windlance
climby this is another one of those kind of games and if you play the lone echo
games it's very similar to that on the base level you are a free diver you are
diving underwater and you can move through the space by grabbing geometry
and pulling yourself throughout this rocks or walls or anything around you
but you can also swim so that's when you do a swimming sensation like this you're
doing the breath stroke and you're pulling yourself there you can you can
doggie paddle if you want to you can pull yourself this way but it's an
interesting locomotion mechanic that we have not seen yet and it's smooth
locomotion that's tied to your hand movements so it does lend itself to
comfort and in fact even turning while you can physically turn you know to do
times I was turning there is no snap instant snap turn you actually have to
paddle yeah and you can change the momentum but you can actually paddle and
drift I actually went into this comfort settings to try to turn on snap turn
because I was not sure I could handle that when I first tried it it's a little
it's a little off setting but you can dial it down so that each paddle to the
left or right only causes you to move so much you can dial that down or up I
ended up turning it back up because I ended up getting comfortable with it
yeah but it that was definitely an interesting choice on that part and I
have not seen that kind of smooth turning down before ever now the
gameplay in the story itself is about an hour long game so very short and yet of
a story but you're free diver on a capsized research vessel and you're
trying to escape this ship and so a very compelling story at the front you know
the ship is upside down oh my god it's filled with water and you
have to survive and it's a survival game you
are going from room to room finding pockets of air finding oxygen tanks and
while you can hold your breath for a long time it gave me this sense of
claustrophobia and sometimes a city now you don't find oxygen yeah you're me
like you missed that oxygen tank back there and the character so you're
watching your oxygen meter go down over here and it's extremely stressful like
you were telling me that you would come to oxygen pockets that were very narrow
and now a tiptoe and like tip my head on my chin up yeah and it tracks my head so
I could breathe and get a little air yeah like that was holding my breath for
some of the parts yeah like it's it's puzzle basically you're trying to get
out of these rooms from room to room and you know get my pocket of air and then
dive back down and kind of look around and then oh no I'm running out of air
and go find that pocket of air and so like from from a pacing mechanic from a
pace the gameplay design I love the kind of immersion that this game brings yeah
it's like norm said it's only about an hour long I actually played through it
in about 45 minutes so it's on that Vader immortal kind of scope and price
so if you if you have a quest and you know that game it's kind of the same
thing where you're paying for you know a small amount of money for a small amount
of really good game like this the quality here is very very high graphics
look great yeah amount of geometry the detail the ship looks really good a lot
of voice acting and dialogue I want to see them do more chapter two three four
right it's a very James Cameron kind of inspired story that I'm sure took some
inspiration from the abyss but what I would love to see this story continue
further than then we got to see it end and this one for sure
well that's freediver it's available right now on the Steam VR store
encourage you to check it out only nine dollars and this week we'll have more
coverage of course in the future thanks for watching and we'll see you next time
bye but it's something there or even when
you're holding something you're holding a physical controller I threw that off
I'm gonna go see that sense again