> This article appeared in the Matilda Ziegler magazine a while back.
 >
 >
 > How do you feel?  No, I'm not asking about
 > your health or your state of mind.  Picking up on the title of our
 > opening article, I am asking how you use your sense of touch.
 > Those who read braille undoubtedly have developed a very sensitive
 > touch over the years.  And those of you who lost most or all of
 > your eyesight after years of seeing have probably learned to use
 > your hands and fingers in ways you once did not think about.
 >      Our first article describes an intriguing new device that
 > simulates the sense of touch so precisely that you seem to be
 > actually feeling a solid object that in fact exists only inside the
 > electronic circuitry of a computer.  While some practical uses for
 > this device have already been developed--remote surgery is the most
 > hopeful application--it seems to me that this new technology could
 > greatly increase the range of knowledge available to blind people.
 > An electronic model of almost anything could be inexpensively
 > devised for blind people to touch.  The real-life model for such
 > electronic sculpture could be something inaccessible to touch
 > because it is too enormous, too remote, too tiny, too repulsive or
 > too dangerous: the space shuttle, the planet Jupiter, the Empire
 > State Building, a scorpion, a molecule.
 >      Think of the possibilities if the device could allow you to
 > "touch" such microscopic, or sub-microscopic things as a red blood
 > cell--or even the molecular structure of the hemoglobin within it--
 > a virus, a bacterium, or a bacteriophage (which is a virus that
 > destroys bacteria).  I am not sure that the inventors of this
 > remarkable technology have given thought to how it could increase
 > the range of tactile sensations for blind people.  You should keep
 > informed about this technology and find ways to have access to new,
 > tangible cyber-objects.
 >      As an interesting footnote, the engineers of this device
 > discovered that in order to simulate the sensation of continuously
 > touching an object, they had to provide 1,000 force-feedback pulses
 > per second.  The eye is much more-easily deceived.  Visual images
 > in the movies appear seamless when presented at the languid rate of
 > 24 frames per second.
 > Soon you'll be able to reach out and touch something on the
 > Internet.
 >     "How Do You Feel?"
 >      (By Brad Lemley.  Reprinted from Discover   August 2000.)
 >
 > I'm beating a monkey's face to a pulp.  But don't run off to alert
 > PETA--it's really not the way it sounds.
 >      The abused ape isn't real.  His face is a digital simulacrum,
 > floating on a highresolution screen, created to help me test a
 > weird computer peripheral called the PHANTOM.  It resembles a desk
 > lamp, minus the bulb and shade, and interacts with the
 > computer-generated image.  Wherever I move the business end of this
 > gadget, the cursor on the screen moves in sync, denting the virtual
 > simian's check, flattening an eyebrow, or crumpling an ear.
 >      In short, the PHANTOM is a computer mouse that has entered
 > into another dimension.  A conventional mouse moves a cursor across
 > the screen in many directions--up, down, diagonal, around--but on
 > only one plane.  This new tool goes not only to the x and y axis
 > but also opens the in-and-out, z axis.  With it, I can smash in the
 > monkey's nose, which is pointed right at me, by pushing my hand
 > forward; the ball-shaped cursor convincingly shrinks as it glides
 > away.  Even more amazing, whenever the ball smacks the monkey's
 > face, I feel the resistance in my hand as a stiff, claylike
 > friction.  In less than a minute, I've become so proficient that I
 > can repair the fellow--smooth lumps, fill dents, and round off
 > broken teeth.  The manufacturer contends a 5-year-old can master
 > this peripheral.  I believe it.
 >      The PHANTOM was designed and built by SensAble Technologies,
 > a seven-year-old company with 50 employees housed in a nondescript
 > brick building in Woburn, Massachusetts.  Coupled with a software
 > program called FreeForm, it may herald an important change in the
 > way human beings and computers interact.  "The last time the
 > computer-human interface had a substantial improvement was the
 > mouse, which came out of Xerox about 25 years ago," says SensAble
 > marketing director Andrew Hally.  "This is the next move up."
 >      Which sounds like the kind of overheated claims marketing
 > directors get paid to make.  Sure, it's a snap to use, but do
 > computer users really long to smash, stroke, poke, or otherwise
 > manipulate and feel the objects on their screens?  After spending
 > a few hours with the PHANTOM, I started to get a feeling of deja
 > vu.  In the early days of personal computing, some users huffily
 > insisted that arrow keys were more than enough, so who needed that
 > goofy mouse?  The mouse evolved from toy to essential tool because
 > it inspired designers to dream up applications for it.  An
 > interface based on haptics--the more technically correct term for
 > interactions involving both feeling and position--will likely
 > follow the same path.  "There are a lot of problems that you can
 > solve better if you can use your sense of touch in 3-D space," says
 > Hally.
 >     The first widespread commercial application of haptic tools
 > arrived as part of computer-aided design, or CAD, of complex forms.
 > My monkey face originated as a concept model to show toy designers
 > how the PHANTOM could help them with their CAD work.  Most of the
 > 600 PHANTOMS sold to date are used by sculptors and engineers for
 > companies such as Adidas, Disney, Hasbro, LEGO and Honda, and users
 > are ebullient.  A mouse-driven CAD program works adequately for
 > designing squarish buildings, but try modeling a titanium hip
 > replacement, a snazzy new sneaker, or an action figure of Jar Jar
 > Binks using only lines, grids and circles.
 >     "To a sculptor, it really is a revolutionary development,"
 > says David R. Fish, who crafts clay footwear models for Nike and is
 > in the process of switching to PHANTOM-based prototyping.  "You're
 > not restricted by gravity or scale, and it's totally intuitive.  I
 > was doing useful work with it within one day."
 >      Not only does the system emulate physical sculpting, it allows
 > techniques that are impossible in real clay, such as pushing out
 > from the inside.  If an artist wants to sculpt a nose, she can
 > click the cursor "off," push it inside the digital clay, click it
 > "on," and then pull material toward her.  Coupled with 3-D
 > printers, which can manufacture plastic items from a computer-
 > specified form, objects sculpted in cyberspace can become real at
 > the touch of a button.
 >      The $15,000 PHANTOM/FreeForm package is among the first haptic
 > applications on the market, but more ambitious systems are already
 > under development.  At the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia
 > Technical Institute, doctors and engineers have created an
 > eye-surgery simulator for training students.  The digital scalpel
 > feeds back springy resistance as it touches the white of the
 > digital eye; then resistance lessens as the cyber-blade slices
 > through.  Physical-skill training of all kinds is "a huge
 > application," says leading haptics researcher J. Kenneth Salisbury,
 > who, while a professor in MIT's mechanical engineering department,
 > helped to develop the PHANTOM with SensAble CEO Thomas Massie.
 > Video game applications are right around the corner.  A San Jose,
 > California, company called Immersion is leading the way with its
 > Wingman Force Feedback Mouse.  For $99, company literature asserts,
 > gamers can "feel terrain, explosions, the effects of magic, and the
 > impact of combat."
 >      The haptics revolution is bolstering telerobotics, in which a
 > remote user, watching via video cameras, directs robotic arms
 > engaged in a task too dangerous, precise or inaccessible for naked
 > flesh.  Telerobotics works a lot better with tactile feedback
 > indicating what the arms are doing.  Applications for such
 > interactive devices include fighting fires, exploring undersea or
 > on other planets, and handling hazardous materials, but the most
 > promising home may be surgery.  Already used for heart operations
 > in the United States and Germany, million-dollar machines allow a
 > surgeon to operate through half-inch-wide incisions by manipulating
 > thin robotic arms.  The minimally invasive procedure speeds
 > patients' recovery and someday may extend surgeons' careers by
 > digitally canceling age-related hand tremors.  "Eventually such
 > techniques will be applicable in neurosurgery or fetal surgery,"
 > says Salisbury, now a professor in both the departments of computer
 > science and surgery at Stanford University.
 >      In the long run, virtually every action that involves
 > real-world touch could be simulated or enhanced via haptic
 > interfaces--and some human activities that have never been
 > touchy-feely could become so.  "I've often wondered if you could
 > teach physics more effectively if your students could feel
 > molecular attraction or planetary motion," says Salisbury.  Or
 > haptic objects might become part of your daily life, he says: "You
 > could go shopping, feel the weight and texture of what you want to
 > buy, examine it from all sides, turn it on, set it down in your
 > virtual kitchen to see how it looks."  Such objects might be
 > analogues of real-world items, but they could just as easily be
 > digital entities, created, traded, modified, passed down to
 > succeeding generations, and ultimately discarded only in
 > cyberspace.
 >      While interacting with a tangible world made only of bytes may
 > seem isolating, Salisbury believes the opposite could prove true.
 > Haptic interfaces linked through the Internet could provide new
 > ways for people to gather.  "You could have collaborative physical
 > efforts: shaking hands, playing volleyball, pushing the stones up
 > the pyramid ramp," he says.  He even imagines scientists performing
 > cooperative haptic molecular engineering.  "Imagine a bunch of
 > people with haptic interfaces putting molecules together.  They
 > push and shove, and finally you hear somebody say, `I think it will
 > go!'"
 >      Someday, we may view haptic interfaces as just one more step
 > we took toward the computer-immersed human.  The evolution began
 > with the first computers, as punch cards and then screens engaged
 > the sense of sight.  Later, computers gained sound, then touch.
 > Today companies such as Digiscents, TriSenx, and Aromajet are
 > laboring to bring smell and even taste to the digital realm.  The
 > omega point is the day when the virtual world becomes as real to
 > humans as the outside, three-dimensional world, with one important
 > distinction.  For good or ill, the virtual world's only limitations
 > will be the ones we choose.
 >      "It's kind of an obvious play on words," Salisbury says, "but
 > we've really only scratched the surface."
 >
 > You have to wonder about humans, they think God is dead and Elvis is
alive!



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