[haptic1216]

I work for a competitor, but I do know a fair bit about HaptX's system.

The force feedback is driven with a complex exotendon (cable) system that can give dynamic resistance as well as just pulling on you.

The tactile haptics are much more interesting. It's a grid of piston actuators in several places along the palm and fingers. They need the huge backpack and separate gigantic floor unit with a compressor to generate the pressure required to push those pistons fast and hard enough.

They also have their own hand and finger tracking. It's actually a pretty cool system.

As an engineer, I respect the hell out of what they're doing. The haptics really are the best thing on the market right now. Unfortunately the cost is so high and the use case so narrow that it just isn't worth it.

So far, VR haptics has really only found use in training and simulation. There's real potential there, but it's a very small market right now. But we do see that it genuinely does help shorten training times when we convince someone to use it.

[tudorw]

Would love to try one of these :) With regards 'only', only can get quite big, 'The global Military Simulation and Training market size was valued at USD 9815.49 Million in 2022 and will reach USD 11603.49 Million in 2028, with a CAGR of 2.83% during 2022-2028.' (from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/military-simulation-training-...)

[9dev]

I wonder if you couldn’t just have gloves with small cushions inflated with air along the fingers and the palm, to simulate light physical resistance. Obviously you could overpower those easily, so it wouldn’t work for some scenarios, but still — shouldn’t that allow for a cheaper way than having huge setup like this?

[haptic1216]

That is more or less exactly what HaptX does.

The problem is latency. Your actuator needs to be able to move from 0 to 100% actuation within a half second or so. Ideally as fast as possible. If there's significant delay between visually seeing your hand contact an object and feeling the haptics, it becomes worse than useless.

To make pneumatic actuators go really fast, you need a lot of pressure. The reason the HaptX system is so big is that they have dozens of individual actuators. You need a lot of valves, which is what's in the backpack. The compressor is a separate unit that sits on the floor. It's also huge.

But this is very much an area of active research. There's a lot of interesting actuators out there. Overall, people seem to be moving away from pneumatics because the cost and complexity is so high.

[9dev]

Awesome, thank you for the thorough explanation. I wasn’t aware that pressure was so big of an engineering challenge here, but that makes perfect sense.

[xattt]

Could there be an application for this to be used in conjunction with an exoskeleton suit (to accommodate the giant backpack)?

Another comment mentioned that these gloves have an application in NN training. Warehouse workers could wear the exoskeleton “bottoms” while providing training data for manipulating various objects.

[haptic1216]

I'm not sure what the gloves add to this scenario. The point of haptic gloves is to give the sensation of virtual objects. It sounds like this idea would work much better by simply pointing an Ultraleap camera at a human doing the task. You want hand tracking data from a human doing a real thing. Haptic feedback isn't helpful here.

Besides, I don't think that training a neural network on hand motions is actually that useful. What you're talking about is a kinematics problem that is totally tangential. You'd want the robot to understand how to manipulate objects, not hands, and not a human body. Watching how a human moves doesn't tell you how a robot moves. The neural network would need to learn how to manipulate arbitrary objects with a robot body. Capturing human motion doesn't help much.

[LoganDark]

> You want hand tracking data from a human doing a real thing.

You want pressure and force information too, for helping train the robot to be dextrous.

[jareklupinski]

curious, if you're allowed to divulge, i wonder if people suffer from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_grill_illusion in similar ways along their other systems

like, have you found if a slight counter-pressure makes for a more significant/faster feeling physical pressure?