Tactile Haptics: A Study of Roughness Perception in Virtual Environments

This thesis presents the design of a tactile device that can be used to display varying magnitudes of roughness. The device is designed to be attached to an existing force feedback device in order to create a package that is able to display both macro-level (force feedback) and micro-level (tactile feedback) information to the users. This device allows the users to feel a simulated texture by placing an index finger on an aperture. The stimulus is created with a spiral brush made of nylon bristles. The brush is attached to a DC motor and the speed and direction of rotation of the brush are used to generate textures at the fingertip through the aperture. Three psychophysical experiments are conducted to study the effects of speed and direction on the roughness perception. The first experiment is designed to investigate the sensitivity to a change in the speed of the brush. This experiment is conducted for two levels of base speed and it is found that as the base speed increases, the just noticeable difference (JND) with respect to speed decreases. In the second experiment, it is found that this tactile device is able to represent textures of rough nature, such as sandpaper. It is also found that the human roughness perception cannot be described in a unique manner. Two opposite definitions of rough textures are identified in this experiment. While some users relate an increase in the speed of the brush to increasing roughness, others relate it to decreasing roughness. Further, the results show that the effects of direction are insignificant on the roughness perception for both groups of users. In the third experiment, the effects of direction are studied more closely by presenting the two directions successively with a time gap of $0.5s$. It is found that with this small time gap, the users are able to discriminate between directions, unlike in the previous experiment. The roughness perception is affected by the change in direction when the time gap is small. These findings open further areas that need to be investigated before a robust tactile device can be designed

ISMCR 1994: Topical Workshop on Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Measurement and Control in Robotics

This symposium on measurement and control in robotics included sessions on: (1) rendering, including tactile perception and applied virtual reality; (2) applications in simulated medical procedures and telerobotics; (3) tracking sensors in a virtual environment; (4) displays for virtual reality applications; (5) sensory feedback including a virtual environment application with partial gravity simulation; and (6) applications in education, entertainment, technical writing, and animation

Enhancing the use of Haptic Devices in Education and Entertainment

This research was part of the two-years Horizon 2020 European Project "weDRAW". The aim of the project was that "specific sensory systems have specific roles to learn specific concepts". This work explores the use of the haptic modality, stimulated by the means of force-feedback devices, to convey abstract concepts inside virtual reality. After a review of the current use of haptic devices in education, available haptic software and game engines, we focus on the implementation of an haptic plugin for game engines (HPGE, based on state of the art rendering library CHAI3D) and its evaluation in human perception experiments and multisensory integration

Role of mechanics in tactile sensing of shape

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-205).by Kiran Dandekar.Ph.D

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 337)

This bibliography lists 400 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during May 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Ethics of hospitality: envisaging the stranger in the contemporary world

The main contention of this thesis is that traditional IR approaches, ethics of migration literature and a part of the poststructural scholarship, either implicitly but also often explicitly, are based on an exclusionary, hierarchical understanding of the Other and an Us versus Them ordering of society even when they purport to contradict it. As such, they engender a collective ethos, which, despite these approaches’ initial intentions or pronounced humanitarian commitments, does not take into account the stranger Other beyond a lordship/bondage view on one hand and allow for exacerbating the violence towards the Other/ stranger on the other. This exacerbation can be noted when looking at current hospitality practices (detention camps; “closed hospitality centres”; state sanctioned illegal push-backs of refugees; “fortress Europe” kind of policies, etc.). Whilst accepting this is not a new problem (movement of individuals, post-conflict waves of refugees, liminal figures in societies and communities have always been present and have constituted parts of on-going theoretical discussions in IR, bringing out theoretical tensions and difficulties), the thesis argues that there are certain novelties to be found: namely, a strengthened overarching security narrative and the resulting militarisation of the treatment of strangers. Against this background, my thesis notes the relative absence of any ethically engaged discussion around hospitality and finds it problematic. It proposes the reconsideration in IR of an umbrella term naming the liminal abject Other. It then argues for the need to reconsider the Levinasian understanding of the ethical responsibility towards the singular and multiple Others through the concept of fraternity. Finally, it revisits the Derridean theorisation of hospitality, i.e., hospitality as an opening up of theory to the “missing” or the Other in Western thought beyond an “Us/ Them” understanding, through an affirmative reading of autoimmunity, arguing that the autoimmunitary ethics of hospitality can enact the ethical responsibility by crossing the threshold of undecidability towards an opening to the Other

Theoretical Marxist approaches in palaeodemography aspects of three Greek regions

The question of the nature of human activity, its specific formulation and function in social production and reproduction is a fundamental one for any theory of social formation, existence and evolution. There are various forces to accounts for which do not remain static as they are categories of human needs and consciousness and they are transformed as society changes. Nonetheless theoretical pre-suppositions in general have rested on the validity of rigid argumentations embedded in a tradition of conservative ideology, with their central feature the a priori reduction of population dynamics and social values to eternal natural laws. In this "Hobbesian society" concepts, categories and methods are the products of the very phenomena they are designed to describe; the effect is empirical closure, artificial separation of the object from its history, and the application in any field of the "true or false” hypotheses, which once categorized remain ever so. However, an understanding of the reality depends on the question we ask. Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms and countings according to some unstated value scheme considered as proven, the Marxist commitment is to detailed study of societies, with written or non-written history, based on the dialectical-historical analysis of relationships and contradictions that must be elaborated, refined and tested both through theory and praxis; and this is the concern of the following thesis

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. an Annotated Bibliography. 1958-1961 Literature, Volumes VII-X, Part 2

Abstracts on aerospace medicine and biology - bibliography on environmental factors, safety and survival, personnel, pharmacology, toxicology, and life support system