Exploring How Haptics Contributes to Immersion in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) has been around for more than fifty years but the technology hasn’t reached practical usability until very recently. With the current head-mounted display (HMD) technology and an abundance of investment in VR startups, we have finally reached at the point where it is possible to simulate complex virtual environments that feel immersive. A major problem with virtual reality is that everything looks real but you can not touch and feel virtual objects. We are focusing on developing a device that will allow users to feel what they touch in VR. We developed a hand-held interface and an android app as a test environment. Commercially-available solutions such as the leap motion developer’s kit were used to track the position of a user’s hand. The actual touch sensation was delivered by a broad-band actuator. Informal testing suggests that being able to feel a virtual object, such as a virtual football, in the hands can enhance user immersion, enjoyment and performance in VR. Future work will improve hand tracking accuracy and range of touch sensations for a more realistic user experience

Making Renewable Energy Certificates Efficient, Trustworthy, and Private

Although renewable energy costs are declining rapidly, producers still rely on additional incentives, such as Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), when making an investment decision. An REC is a proof that a certain amount of energy was generated from a renewable resource. It can be traded for cash in an REC market. Unfortunately, existing mechanisms to ensure that RECs are trustworthy---not fraudulently generated and from a universally-agreed renewable energy source---require periodic physical audits of the generation plant, which adds costly administrative overheads and locks out small producers. Although prior work has attempted to address these issues, existing solutions lack privacy and are vulnerable to tampering. In this work, we design, implement, and evaluate a system that is efficient, trustworthy, and anonymous, thus opening the REC market to small-scale energy producers. We describe two implementations based on a commercially-available Azure Sphere microcontroller unit combined with a permissioned Blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, and a permissionless Blockchain, Algorand