You saw it first at the NFB Convention. There is not one word about
blindness in this article. Perhaps that's what it will take to make
this technology affordable.
This is from the web page of EE Times, from CMP Publications.
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Breakthrough brings touch to 3-D
By Larry Lange
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A breakthrough product called Phantom is spawning
a firestorm of activity in the next frontier of the 3-D virtual space:
haptics--or "touch"--technology. Research in a slew of applications,
from electronic design to automotive and medical systems, could one
day yield such futuristic scenarios as virtual circuit boards that
designers can manipulate by hand and surgical simulations that let
doctors "feel" an organ without making a cut.
The technology to simulate virtual touch is known as "force feedback,"
and engineers and scientists are finding that applying this tactile
dimension opens the door to new possibilities. Indeed, continuing
projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Naval
Research Lab, Mitsubishi, General Electric and Toyota are showing
marked progress in a variety of application areas.
Centered largely on the Phantom hardware from SensAble Technologies,
here, tactile computing is also beginning to move out over the
Internet, thanks to the company's new software release. Other pioneers
offering PC-based force-feedback systems include Immersion Corp. (San
Jose, Calif.) and Cybernet Systems Corp. (Ann Arbor, Mich.).
"When you use a computer, you use your sense of sight to perceive
what's inside and your sense of hearing to hear representations of
what's inside. But there's been nothing available that lets you
interact with a sense of touch," said Thomas Massie, co-inventor of
the Phantom and chief technology officer at SensAble. Until now, that
is.
Looking a bit like a miniature Luxo lamp with a thimble on the end,
the Phantom system, running on a fast Pentium processor, allows
designers to write software that simultaneously processes signals from
motion sensors on the Phantom's arm and sends instructions back to the
motors, telling them how much pressure to apply to the thimble. The
digital relay repeats 1,000 times per second, making the Phantom
sensitive to the subtlest of hand motions.
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SensAble has coined the term "3-D touch" rather than use the
scientific-sounding haptics for what Massie sees as the next wave in
computing. "In the real world, this is how we interact with the
world--we touch things, we move them around," he said. "We don't point
a mouse at them. Touch is how we confirm reality."
In agreement is Thomas von Wiegand, a research scientist at MIT's
Research Lab of Electronics (RLE). His team is working on projects
that centrally use the Phantom, such as Virtual Environments for
Training Electronics Troubleshooting. "We are particularly excited at
the prospect of haptically conveying abstract fields--such as a rise
in electromagnetic analysis or vector calculus," von Wiegand said.
As an initial demonstration, part of the MIT/RLE team's efforts are
being directed toward enabling manual interaction with virtual
electronic circuit boards and components. Dubbed the Electronic
Troubleshooting Task, the project is a combined initiative with the
Naval Air Warfare Center/Training Systems Division.
Touch, von Wiegand said, is giving virtual reality a new dimension.
"Our results enable a more convincing presentation than that obtained
using the more typical head-mounted display and VR glove-based
interface." He added that haptics-based technology is well-suited for
surgical training for procedures mediated by instruments that already
utilize mechanical linkages, such as in laparoscopic surgery.
That's exactly what Sarah Gibson believes. As a research scientist at
Mitsubishi Electronics Research Lab (Cambridge), Gibson leads a team
that's building a simulation system to train surgeons for
arthroscopic--typically joint-injury--surgery. The system includes a
computer model of the knee, the Phantom force-feedback device for
haptic sensing of the virtual model and real-time rendering of the
knee model.
"Often, what a surgeon feels is just as important as what he or she
sees during surgery," said Gibson. "Tissues such as healthy brain
tissue and tumors might be visually indistinguishable, but they feel
very different. Surgeons also rely heavily on their sense of touch
when cutting or suturing tissues."
By using haptics and force feedback, the Mitsubishi team is providing
a virtual sense of touch for surgeons to implement during interaction
with a computer model--or even while assisting in remote surgery.
General Electric Co., too, has recently begun applying the Phantom in
medical R&D. At the GE Haptic Volume Visualization and Modeling Lab in
Schenectady, N.Y., work with MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) is
being investigated. "GE has this multimillion-dollar machine and of
course, MRIs are very expensive," said Massie at SensAble. "After a
doctor scans a person, he has to take this 3-D data and somehow
interpret it. But the best he can do right now is to 'slice' the data
into a two-dimensional plane and then show it on a screen. GE has
written a program that uses a Phantom and actually allows a user to go
in and touch this 3-D data. For instance, you can go in and touch a
tumor."
With the GE system, said Massie, "you can virtually cut away the skin,
or the skull, and look at the brain in three dimensions. You can feel
the nasal passages, the ear canal. You can take the lips off the model
and look at the tongue behind it. Obviously, this makes better use of
the million-dollar MRI machine, and you are also allowing the doctor
to make a better diagnosis."
Taking touch one stop further is a haptics team from the Computer
Science and Physics Labs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, where research scientists have linked a Phantom to an
atomic-force microscope that can map a strand of DNA. The result is a
system that lets researchers actually feel each atom.
That breakthrough raises the possibility of using Phantom to gain
tactile access to generally intangible objects. "If you're touching a
DNA strand, you can touch an algorithm," said Massie. "We actually
debug a lot of our own code here at SensAble by touching it. We can
feel our bugs to figure out what's going on, rather than going
directly into the code. That's very compelling."
Similarly, the University of Utah is using the Phantom to visualize
airflow around computer models, in effect simulating aerodynamics.
SensAble sees several opportunities for the application of 3-D touch
in design engineering, and detailed some of them at the recent Design
Engineering Conference in Chicago. For example, said Massie, "You
could imagine going in and feeling temperature gradient right in the
chip."
The immediate design niche is in CAD, said Massie. "CAD is fine right
now for very linear types of things, where you need straight lines,
exact curves and exact dimension." More difficult is "free-form
design. What's the shape of a mouth? Those things are still done today
with blue foam and clay; industrial designers are still very much
craftsmen." Thus, SensAble is working closely with Japan's Toyota
Corp. on a Phantom-based haptic solution for automobile design.
For its part, Cybernet Systems has offered force-feedback solutions
for customers such as Ford Motor Co., NASA and joystick manufacturer
ThrustMaster Inc. since 1988. Last year it received a $1 million
contract from the U.S. Army to develop a full-body simulator
synchronized with a visual presentation based on a head-mounted
display.
As for Immersion, "the excitement over our technology has been simply
astounding," said chief executive officer Louis Rosenberg. "It is
overwhelming to be a small startup company with a technology that
everyone suddenly wants." Though offering a suite of force-feedback
products for medical applications, the company's "I-Force" technology
has also found favor in the gaming industry, including a plethora of
major joystick makers.
Further game applications may arise now that SensAble has released
software that offers the ability to touch objects over the Internet.
With the recent debut of WebTouch and the Ghost Software Developer's
Kit, it's now fairly simple for haptic-happy industries to create
real-world applications.
Available as a standalone application or as a Netscape Navigator
plug-in, WebTouch enables a browser to read in Virtual Reality
Modeling Language (VRML) files. "You don't need a VRML browser," said
Massie. "People don't have to build any new 3-D models to accommodate
our tools if they want to touch them--all the work that's been done
for 15 years of digitizing models carries over."
For all the activity, haptics development is not without its technical
problems. For example, Mitsubishi's Gibson says SensAble's Phantom has
an "elegant mechanical design and we have been happy with its
performance." However, she said, "the current Phantom version can't
provide torque feedback, something that is needed for medical
applications."
In addition, "one other shortcoming of the Phantom's motor-driven
approach is that the sizes of the reflected [feedback] forces are
limited. If you push only reasonably hard on the Phantom, you can push
right through the virtual bone model."
MIT's von Wiegand also foresees problems in convincing the public
about haptics. "Despite the improvements in surgical technique that
can be attained by interposing a computer between the surgeon's hand
and his instrument, it may be a while before the public accepts being
probed or cut by a telerobotic or computer-mediated linkage," he said.
"Even if the system utilizes force feedback, the spectacular
consequences of a software glitch during such a surgical procedure are
sure to capture the public's imagination, limiting acceptance."
Eventually, though, "as with the accepted medical use of lasers, the
public will embrace the technology as its safety and reliability are
proven in practice."
Massie said the overwhelming demand for SensAble's technology has
spawned confusion as to which direction the firm should move in. But
he retains his enthusiasm for the potential of the basic haptic
technology it is founded on. "We'd like to see a Phantom on every
desktop in the world," he said.
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National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
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