Inside Pittsburgh Tech explores the products coming out of Pittsburgh that will change the world.
Virtual reality has been in video games for more than a decade, allowing gamers to put on goggles to transport themselves into worlds that look quite different from the one in which they’re physically standing.
During the past few years, tech leaders such as Apple and Meta have embraced these new realities by introducing Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 – goggles that incorporate the latest technology to create a greater sense of reality and immersion.
Yet the sense of touch in virtual environments has not kept pace with the visual and auditory nature of VR, a fact that wasn’t lost on Carnegie Mellon researchers Craig Schultz and Joe Mullenbach.
They recognized that as long as touch was simulated with electromechanical methods, it would be difficult to get a true sense of feeling in a VR environment.
So the two, as part of their work in the Future Interface Group at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, decided to use an alternative method of simulating touch – haptic sensors made of fluid.
Schultz and Mullenbach founded Oakland-based Fluid Reality and got their business head start in CMU’s Venture Bridge and Swartz Center’s Entrepreneur Fellowship Program.
Their haptic sensors – much like the sensors on your smartphone or smartwatch – change to create sensations of touch, but they’re different because they use liquid instead of mechanical devices to do their jobs.
Among the advantages of haptic sensors, Schultz and Mullenbach say, is their small size –2 millimeters by 2 millimeters instead of 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters for electromechanical sensors – thus enabling them to be used differently.
According to Mullenbach, using fluids also means they can be made less expensively, require less energy and can be placed in large arrays – multiple fluid sensors can occupy the same space as a single electromagnetic sensor.
At October’s Women in Science and Technology Conference, says Mullenbach, “we demonstrated 160 actuators on a hand, which simply would not be possible with conventional technologies.”
“When you’re interacting in VR or AR [augmented reality], the immersion would break apart if you go to touch things,” he says. “If you’re virtually picking something up, you won’t feel it properly.”
By placing 32 fluid actuators into each finger of a glove, he continues, “when you reach out and touch, we can display the touch on your fingertips.”
Mullenbach anticipates enterprises using Fluid Reality sensors “anytime you have something that is expensive or dangerous or difficult to get in front of.”
At this time, Mullenbach hesitates to say when his fluid-based haptic actuators will hit the market but says he’s already working with potential clients as well as with Pittsburgh-based investors.
Know of a product or service being developed in Pittsburgh or by a Pittsburgh-based company that is cool, is creating growth or will change the world? Let David know via email.
