[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.