Beyond Smartphones, Emerging Stretchable/Flexible Wearables Exploration in the Era of the Internet of Things, Augmented/Virtual Reality, and Data Mining
(Making the virtual feel real)
The Virtual Reality experience is limited by its unintuitive control and ineffectiveness in targeting senses besides sight. Haptic feedback can solve these issues by intuitively providing more information to the user, allowing them to explore virtual worlds in a completely new level of immersion.
Our project, in collaboration with Samsung, originated from creating a wearable leveraging emerging flexible electronic technologies to somehow enhance the Virtual Reality experience. After extensive design research, the idea that we decided to develop is a glove with an array of sensors and actuators to haptic feedback for VR users to feel virtual objects and boundaries.
Our current stage is technological research and prototyping to understand the capabilities of haptic actuators to develop artificial perception of texture and to generate a human-computer interaction “haptic language.” We aim to allow users to cognitively understand when they are touching a virtual object or surface. Based on our design and technological roadmap, we predict that this type of technology will be one of the future breakthroughs that will revolutionize the way people immerse in virtual environments.
IoT Smart Office Environment; Interaction between users and systems
What will the office of the future be like? Floating chairs and robot surrogates? Not anytime soon. The Smart Office that we envision uses Internet of Things technology to create an environment that responds to workers’ needs. Desks will automatically change from seated to standing mode when a worker gets sleepy, lights and sounds will respond to workers’ stress states, and computers will invite users to take breaks when they need them. We built prototypes based on user interviews and observations, tested them on users, and iterated to develop a vision that we are excited to share with you.