Over in Europe, researchers with the Immersence project are working to bridge the gap between real reality and virtual reality with a series of projects working on tele-immersion and haptic feedback. One interesting project used 3D scanners to analyze and digitize a physical object, then transfer the data to a remote location where a user to interact with it in Virtual reality.
“Haptic technology is still in the early stages. For the haptic interface, we used a robotic arm called a PHANTOM that has one contact point. This gives the sense of touching an object, but you can’t pick it up or handle it. However, one of the other project partners, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, is developing a haptic device with two contact points that should make it possible to grasp an object with a virtual hand,” Schweinberger explains.
In another project they used similar technology and a headset viewer to create realistic ‘robot dancers’ that could be replaced (in VR) with the avatar of another user.
At the lab in Munich, they used a mobile robotic platform with two arms to serve as the dance partner for a real human dancer. By wearing VR goggles, the user would see a dancer of the opposite sex and could dance with them by holding the “hands” of the robot.
“To program the robot we first recorded the forces, balance and movement of a real human dancer and applied these to the robot. In a VR environment, the robot could be a computer-controlled agent or the avatar of another person,” the project manager says.
Now how long before someone hooks this up to something like Second Life?
