Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Haptic Interaction with 3D oriented point clouds on the GPU

Real-time point-based rendering and interaction with virtual objects is gaining popularity and importance as di�erent haptic devices and technologies increasingly provide the basis for realistic interaction. Haptic Interaction is being used for a wide range of applications such as medical training, remote robot operators, tactile displays and video games. Virtual object visualization and interaction using haptic devices is the main focus; this process involves several steps such as: Data Acquisition, Graphic Rendering, Haptic Interaction and Data Modi�cation. This work presents a framework for Haptic Interaction using the GPU as a hardware accelerator, and includes an approach for enabling the modi�cation of data during interaction. The results demonstrate the limits and capabilities of these techniques in the context of volume rendering for haptic applications. Also, the use of dynamic parallelism as a technique to scale the number of threads needed from the accelerator according to the interaction requirements is studied allowing the editing of data sets of up to one million points at interactive haptic frame rates

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a natural development from virtual reality (VR), which was developed several decades earlier. AR complements VR in many ways. Due to the advantages of the user being able to see both the real and virtual objects simultaneously, AR is far more intuitive, but it's not completely detached from human factors and other restrictions. AR doesn't consume as much time and effort in the applications because it's not required to construct the entire virtual scene and the environment. In this book, several new and emerging application areas of AR are presented and divided into three sections. The first section contains applications in outdoor and mobile AR, such as construction, restoration, security and surveillance. The second section deals with AR in medical, biological, and human bodies. The third and final section contains a number of new and useful applications in daily living and learning

Reviver Voce: The Voice, Technology, and Death

This is Reviver Voce. A deliberate verbal play on viva voce, the Latin term meaning, ‘By word of mouth; in speech; orally’ (OED 2020) Given the oral nature of this submission, it is understandably a pun that works better when spoken aloud, but this title has not simply been selected for wordplay or the direct reference to the oral defence of a doctoral thesis. Mladen Dolar, in his discussion of the political role of the voice, observes that the ‘viva voce, or just viva . . . has to be made “in the living voice”’ (2006: 110). It is this conception of “the living voice”—and its implied other, “the dead voice”—that sits at the core of this research: the work confronts the revivification of voices in recorded media, reassessing the relationship between technology, the voice, and death, and considering the ideological implications inherent within this emergent realm: the voice’s position within this act of revivification. This research represents a study of the voice and its relationship to technological developments and death: what our voices mean to us, to others, and to death in this ever-changing space. For over a century the dead have “lived on” through audio, but with each advancement in sound recording and media storage we see new uses for the deceased and the bereaved. The voice, as a unique identifier of a person and their life, is entering new territory in a world of hypothetical digital immortality where it is possible to digitise an individual’s vocal characteristics. As the spoken voice is central to this research, this thesis comprises of a collection of 33⅓ rpm, long-play records, primarily—but not entirely—voiced by the author. The introduction and subsequent chapters are presented on separate pressings, each side roughly 30 minutes in length. Practice, too, is submitted on this physical, audio-only medium. Through this research, it is suggested that developments in technology, a shift to everyday and pedestrian practices of recording, and our changing interactions with new media, leave the voice and death, and our relationship with the two, in fundamentally altered spaces