[Cyborg] Aireal: Interactive Tactile Experiences in Free Air

[Carlos Castellanos]

Sound artist Miha Ciglar has been using ultrasound as a sort of instrument/synthesizer interface. His work is pretty cool. He basically just lays a bunch of ultrasonic transducers on plate and uses them as pretty fine-grained interface to music/sonic parameters:

http://www.ciglar.mur.at/sonicbeams.html

I was working on an art installation using this technique a couple of years ago but have not been able to get the funds for it. The method/equipment used in Iwamoto et al. (2008) looks relatively simple and inexpensive so I was going to go with that. This AIREAL looks a bit more sophisticated (and expensive?)

-Carlos

On Jul 21, 2013, at 10:57 AM, Todd Anderson <todicus at gmail.com> wrote:

> That is really cool! I've heard of vortex generators used as scent delivery devices, and even tried to make one with an old camera aperture and a speaker. The speaker didn't have enough displacement, I think, so just covering the open end of a tin can with stretchy material, and making a small hole on the opposite side, gave better results (though required a finger tap).
> 
> As for latency, they say ~140 msec at a distance of 1 meter. Good not great. Here is a chart of vortex speed vs distance traveled:
> 
> <Screenshot_7_21_13_1_51_PM.png>
> 
> 
> The phased array ultrasound mentioned in the intro sounds pretty awesome; has anyone experienced something like this?
> 
> "In ultrasound-based acoustic radiation fields [Iwamoto et al. 
> 2008; Suzuki et al. 2010; Jason et al. 2011], a two-dimensional 
> array of 324 ultrasonic transducers operating at 40kHz form a 
> beam of ultrasound using a phased array focusing technique. 
> Because of the low ultrasound frequency, 99.9% of incident acoustic 
> energy will reflect from the human skin creating a pressure field 
> which provides perceivable tactile sensations. By modulating the 
> ultrasound beam at ~200 Hz, the perceived intensity of tactile 
> sensations increases due to the high sensitivity of skin to vibratory 
> stimuli at this frequency [Sherrick 1991]. A phased array technique 
> is used to control the focal point of the ultrasound beam 
> [Suzuki et al. 2010]."
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Eric Boyd <mrericboyd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/aireal/
> 
> It looks really cool!  Basically, vortices of air are directed at the user as they interact with a motion detection system (like Kinect or Leap Motion), and the air pressure changes are the haptic feedback.  I'd love to know how it actually feels.  It looks to me like one of the big limitations is gonna be the lag time - it's gonna take a noticeable amount of time to generate and propagate the air to the user, so feedback can't be super fast.
> 
> They claim they 3D printed most of the device.  The actuators are actually speakers ("whisper subwoofer").  I imagine if you have a leap motion you could hack together something like this...
> 
> Eric
> 
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c a r l o s   c a s t e l l a n o s
interdisciplinary artist + researcher
DPrime Research
carlos at ccastellanos.com
http://ccastellanos.com
http://dprime.org






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