Using inertial sensing a portable device's movements in 3D space can be tracked, analysed and referenced to the posture of the user. This enables a user to store and access information on his or her own body space. For example, online banking information could be accessed by moving the device to your back pocket. Similarly, your music archive could be located at your ear.

The concept idea was developed in the Royal College of Art in 2002 through user testing and scenario building. The current challege is to realise a working prototype to enable real life testing and evaluation.

More information is available on the Body Mnemonics website.

People: Jussi Angesleva, Stephen Hughes, Ian Oakley, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

We are using a radio controlled toy car to demonstrate this concept. Radio controlled vehicles are traditionally interfaced with a controller equipped with spring loaded levers for forward/reverse and left/right. The operator relies on observing the vehicle in order to make the decisions needed to steer it. The controlling interface offers no tactile information to the user about what forces the vehicle is 'experiencing'. We want to enhance the interactivity and improve the control of the vehicle by developing a handset controller which enables the user to actually feel the forces the vehicle is experiencing as it accelerates, brakes and turns.

To achieve this we will mount accelerometers in the vehicle to measure the fluctuations in tilt, roll and yaw resulting from driving. This will relay information about the terrain the car is traveling over. The information from the accelerometers will be sent to the handset via a radio link. That information will be interpreted and translated into a physical force in the handset. This force is generated through gyroscopic precession and vibrotactile display.

People: Andy Brady, Ian Oakley, Stephen Hughes, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

More information and some downloads relating to the Touching Tales project can be found on its dedicated website

People: Ian Oakley, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain, Alison Woods, Stephen Davies

One unique aspect of this project is that it is exploring touch communication that does not take place in a tightly coupled and interactive scenarios. This means that it does not require the extremely low latency links typical of haptic communication systems, and makes it ideal for use over existing communication technologies such as the Internet.

Software downloads and more information on ContactIM can be found on its dedicated website.

People: Ian Oakley, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

A musician's performance is intimately bound up with their physical means of expression. The instrument constrains, but its unique character colours and informs the performance. Until now, much of the focus in musical interface design has concentrated on the keyboard. The wind and string communities have been particularly poorly served - the more 'organic' nature of their interaction with their instrument making it much harder to measure meaningfully.

The goal of this project is to develop a very palpable interface based on the Irish Uilleann Pipes, a polyphonic reeded woodwind with a complex (some might say bizarre) interface. The EpipE interface will use a combination of capacitive and optical sensing technologies to provide continuous tonehole control - an element missing from existing electronic woodwinds and essential for expressive performance - and output a set of parameters which may be used to drive physically-based instrument models in a performance context and ultimately to generate a MIDI control stream allowing it to be used with the huge base of existing music software.

People: Cormac Cannon, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

HyperPuja is a novel controller that closely mimicks the behavior of a Tibetan Singing Bowl rubbed with a "puja" stick. Our design hides the electronics from the performer to maintain the original look and feel of the instrument and the performance. This is achieved by using wireless technology to keep the stick untethered and the electronics is buried inside the core of the stick. The measured parameters closely resemble the input parameters of a related physical synthesis model allowing for convenient mapping of sensor parameters to synthesis input. The new controller allows for flexible choice of sound synthesis while fully maintaining the characteristics of the physical interaction of the original instrument and its haptic properties.

People: Diana Young (MIT ML), Georg Essl

The importance of the contribution of the tactile response to the playability of musical instruments has long been known. However, it remains largely an open question as to how meaningful tactile responses ought to be designed. Usually only the immediate tactile response of an instrument is of interest. Some instruments have an additional secondary tactile characteristic which only indirectly relates to the performance technique. This is, for example, the case with drumming, where the motion of the membrane creates a secondary tactile sensation for the performer. This secondary response is deemed important for the performer as it provides additional physical feedback, especially in cases of collaborative drumming performances. An electronic feed back drumming device is developed to shed light on the importance of indirect tactile responses in new music instrument design.

People: Georg Essl, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

This project addresses the issues of ungrounded haptic display. Force feedback devices are typically mounted to a solid object thus grounding the forces they exert. This ensures the device can output clear defined forces. In the case of handheld devices the individual holding the device (and experiencing the forces) is also grounding the device. This can cause significant diffculties in perceieving the forces presented. This project looks at novel technologies for ungrounded haptic display. In its latest incarnation a pair of movable plates have been arranged parallel to each other. The upper plate is grounded by the heel of the hand and the lower (moving) plate is felt by the fingertips. The moving plate can be actuated to provide force displacement providing a compelling illusion of force feedback in a handheld ungrounded device.

People: Andy Brady, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

As the boundaries between real and virtual environments become blurred and we begin to use real objects as handles for objects in virtual scenes, interesting questions relating to the relationship between real objects and their virtual counterparts arise.

In this project we address one such question: What is the effect of cross-modal disparity in "field of view" on our ability to make the link between the behaviour of an object we are holding in the real world and viewing in a virtual environment.

To address this question, we propose to design a series of tasks in which we will manipulate the relationship between haptic properties (orientation, number of parts etc.) of the real-world object and visual properties of its virtual counterpart. In the first iteration, the number of real and virtual objects to be manipulated will be equal. In the second phase of this work we will look at our ability to recognise and control one object in a complex virtual scene. Psychophysical paradigms will be employed to test the efficiency of cross-modal perception in humans using speed of response and errors as measures. The experimental protocol will be encapsulated in a game that will require a speeded decision (e.g. identify 'own' virtual, manipulated object in time to escape from 'predator' virtual object). The relationship between the virtual image and its haptic counterpart will be varied in order to compare the limits on recognition. Examples of such variations will be changing the 'viewpoint' between the visual and haptic object, the number of object parts, and the number of moveable object parts. In the real world, the cross-modal viewpoint is often perfectly correlated such that, e.g. if the handle of a mug is seen to be on the left, then the hand will move to the left of the mug. But sometimes the haptic information is in an unfamiliar viewpoint for the visual system, such as feeling an object which is behind the body. Similarly, the object may have parts which are not visible to the eye, but can nevertheless be felt. By varying the degree of correspondence between the haptic and virtual (visual) image, our results will help outline neuroscientific principles for the design of multi-modal virtual environments and further improve our understanding of cross-modal perception in humans.

People: Andy Woods, Dr. Fiona Newell (Trinity College Dublin)
Dr. Sile O'Modhrain

Angela Chang, Zahra Kanji, Dr. Sile O'Modhrain, Professor Robert Jacob, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii

This haptic display technology combined with sensors to detect the pressure applied by the user and an internet link, gives rise to even more applications. A pair of pin arrays connected through the internet could enable bi-directional haptic communication over long distances allowing users on opposite sides of the world to virtually 'touch' each other.

Previous pin arrays have typically suffered from problems such as low resolution, low refresh rates, high power consumption, high cost, complicated construction and insufficient force. ReTouch incorporates a novel actuator design that attempts to address these issues.