Meta’s Beat Games teased earlier this month that everyone’s favorite block-slicing rhythm game Beat Saber was finally getting the music pack that always needed to happen: Daft Punk. Now that day has come, which arrives with some improved haptics on Quest that promise to be harder, better, faster (and) stronger.
Check out the 10-track list below:
Around The World
Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger (Live 2007)
Da Funk / Daftendirekt (Live 2007)
Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers)
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Lose Yourself to Dance (feat. Pharrell Williams)
One More Time
Technologic
The Prime Time of Your Life/The Brainwasher/Rollin’/Alive (Live 2007)
Veridis Quo
Sadly, there’s nothing from Daft Punk’s musical score of Tron: Legacy (2010) since the OST is under the Walt Disney music label, while all of the above are under Virgin Records (for earlier albums) and Columbia Records (for later releases). Meta has worked with Virgin parent company Universal Music Group and Columbia parent Sony Music Entertainment in the past on other music packs, so it makes sense from a licensing perspective.
With the release of the Daft Punk music pack, Beat Games says it will also introduce advanced haptics for Quest 3 and Quest Pro, and will include haptic improvements for Quest 2 as well.
Meta released it Haptics Studio and Haptics SDK for Unity early last year to help developers fine-tune haptics across Quest 2/3/Pro, which, at least on Quest 3 and Quest Pro controllers includes wideband, voice coil motors which let designers and developers create more lifelike, textured effects that feel closer to real world experiences.
HaptX, the company building high-end haptic VR gloves for enterprises, launched its latest model, DK2, which is now available for purchase. The new version is said to have improved haptics, force-feedback, size, comfort, and manufacturability.
Previously, HaptX was only able to loan evaluation units of its gloves to interested parties, because the company was “severely limited in the number of units we could manufacture,” says CEO Jake Rubin. With the newly announced DK2 model, the company says it has streamlined the design which has enabled it to manufacture enough of the gloves to sell them outright.
“[Our manufacturing capacity was limited] due to a combination of the high complexity of our system, the number of novel components and production processes involved, and our limited manufacturing experience as a startup. Our manufacturing challenges were one of the primary catalysts behind our comprehensive partnership with Advanced Input Systems,” says Rubin “[…] we have been able to radically streamline manufacturing of the system. This has enabled us to finally satisfy the demand we’ve generated with our DK1 and earlier prototype systems by allowing customers to purchase DK2 outright and begin deploying HaptX technology at scale within their organizations.”
Part of that streamlining process also means slimming the system down. The Air Controller unit, which powers the pneumatic-based haptics in the gloves, once weighed 180 pounds. While the gloves are far from compact, with HaptX DK2 the company has reduced the system’s overall size enough to be able to mount the Air Controller on the user’s back. “We do expect that many, if not most, of our customers will use the system in room-scale [backpack] mode given the enhanced immersion and mobility,” Rubin says.
Image courtesy HaptX
Unfortunately the backpack unit doesn’t include the computer hardware necessary for the VR headset itself, so users will still need to be tethered to a PC or use a wireless solution.
Beyond the smaller Air Controller and improved manufacturing, Rubin says the DK2 has a handful of other improvements.
The force-feedback system can now apply up to 40 pounds of resistance per hand, and also has better stiffness and lower latency. The finger-tracking hardware in the gloves has also been massively shrunk down from two external boxes to a small board which is built directly into the gloves. Further, Rubin says, the gloves have improved fit and ergonomics, and are easier to put on and take off.
With these improvements, HaptX is now selling their gloves directly to enterprise customers. Though an official price hasn’t been announced, we understand the cost to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per unit.
That huge price tag puts the HaptX DK2 gloves in the high-end of the already expensive enterprise-focused VR sector, among the likes of Varjo’s enterprise headsets. While the company surely expects to further slim its gloves down in both size and price, if there’s buyers out there today we’d expect to find them in massive industries like military, medical, automotive, et al.
The company behind the force feedback haptic gloves HaptX and research teams from Virginia Tech and University of Florida have secured a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), something the group says will allow them to build full-body haptic and force feedback tech for VR and robotics.
Called ‘ForceBot’, the project is slated to let users feel “large-scale passive and active constraints on their movements that closely mimic real-world forces,” the group says, allowing users to feel the shape, weight, and texture of virtual objects, move naturally in VR, and use telepresence robots for object manipulation.
Image courtesy HaptX
ForceBot is being funded by the the NSF’s National Robotics Initiative, which is dedicated to accelerating the development and use of robots in the US that work beside or cooperatively with people.
“ForceBot will advance knowledge at the convergence of virtual reality, robotic control, sensory feedback, ergonomics, and human factor fields,” said Dr. Alexander Leonessa, Principal Investigator, Virginia Tech. “We’re excited to create a system that increases immersion for VR users in applications requiring intensive body motions like sports and industrial skills training, gaming, emergency response, and many others.”
HaptX is best known for its industrial-grade Haptx Gloves Developer Kit, which combines an exoskeletal glove for force feedback and integrated micro-pneumatics for detailed haptics delivered to the fingertips.
Not much is known about everything going into ForceBot, however the project is slated to incorporate HaptX Gloves in addition an articulated motion platform for walking in virtual environments.
Tactical Haptics’ new controller form factor, SaberGrip, is aimed at delivering immersive VR sword fights, fishing games and much more.
Revealed today, the SaberGrip is shaped a little like a sword hilt and features the same haptic actuation as seen in the company’s other controllers, but the form factor gives it a more natural feel in certain types of experiences. One of those experiences is sword-fighting, so the company built a tech demo based around that concept you can see below.
In the experience, contact with the enemy’s sword, shield and body is felt via sliding plates that create a haptic illusion. Future updates to the demo could also include multiplayer support, so we can finally settle scores with more realistic-feeling sword battles. The controllers don’t feature the same modular design as some of the company’s other controllers, instead built with these specific types of experiences in mind.
In another example, Tactical Haptics also revealed a VR fishing demo. In this experience, you’ll feel the tug when trying to reel in a fish. Tactical Haptics says it developed the new style of controller after hearing interest from VR arcade partners. Seen below, the company also developed a two-handed version of the SaberGrip it says could be more beneficial for experiences like this.
Finally, Tactical Haptics is today announcing a new version of its Multi-Pose magnetic design that fits the Oculus Quest controllers, bringing its tech in line with Facebook’s standalone headset. The company launched an Enterprise-level developer kit last year. We’re likely still some way from these controllers being ready for consumers to take home, though.
To those out of the loop, the Kat Walk C treadmill is a VR peripheral that allows users to walk on the spot and have their movement reflected in VR. It works by getting users to stand on a large dish, wear special shoes and strap into a harness, which then allows them to walk on the spot to provide a new locomotion option for VR players. It supports PC VR and PSVR headsets and, according to Kat VR, will work with games that have a free locomotion setting.
By reaching $1.6 million in funding, the campaign also smashed all five of its stretch goals, which add more hardware and software features to the device. You can read details of all the stretch goals over on the Kickstarter page, but the biggest is the $1.5 million goal, which will see a ‘Haptic Feedback Module’ added into the base of the platform. There’s not too many details on how the module might work in practice, but no doubt it will add some kind of vibration or feedback to the experience while players walk around in VR using the treadmill.
Production of the Kat Walk C is to start in September and the first batch of devices anticipates shipping in October of this year. You can read more here or over on the Kickstarter campaign page.
Promising new VR haptics research may eventually lead to thinner, consumer-ready glove controllers.
The research, carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) uses ‘soft active surfaces’ filled with oil to create a sense of touch when picking up objects and interacting with items in VR. Check it out in the video below.
As you can see, the approach uses electrical impulses to manipulate a small amount of dielectric fluid (in this case, vegetable oil) housed in pockets made up of a stretchable membrane. When activated with a voltage, the oil compresses together to create bumps that will press against the user’s fingers. Imagine picking an object up in VR, for example, and the surface pushing into your fingers as you grasped it. The oil can even be vibrated, which may provide deeper immersion when, say, blocking an attack with a shield.
Right now, EPFL researchers have created bumps between three to 20 millimeters in size with up to 25 devices aligned together. However, the group hopes to take its work further with a design integrated into a haptic glove that covers the entire hand.
Obviously, having not tried the tech for ourselves, we can’t speak to the quality of the haptic sensations this approach might provide. Would bumps be able to cover a wide enough surface area to create a truly convincing, consistent haptic sensation, for example?
That said, the miniaturization of haptic VR gloves is one of the key areas holding them back from consumerization right now. Companies like HaptX have impressive devices for enterprise use, but they cost far too much and are way too bulky to use with headsets like Oculus Quest. EPFL’s work is early, but could provide a path to thinner VR gloves that we could finally take home.
What do you make of this new VR haptics research? Let us know in the comments below!
A Florida-based military training and technology company, ECS (Engineering & Computer Simulations) has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project to develop “haptics-based mixed reality training systems within the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment.”
The project will be developed in conjunction with the Defense Health Agency and includes a partnership with haptic glove company HaptX and the Mayo Clinic at the College of Medicine and Science in Florida.
“This type of haptics integration offers a sense of touch and natural interactions within various virtual, augmented, and mixed reality scenarios,” said Waymon Armstrong, ECS CEO and President. “When applied in a medical environment, this integration with TC3 will provide our Warfighters and healthcare professionals the tools that they need to improve their quality of training and retention to potentially save more lives.””
The HaptX Gloves will be integrated into several areas of medical training in the Department of Defense, which aim to provide haptic feedback in training environments, as to reduce the need for “live tissue training.” The programs will use both augmented and virtual reality systems, with multi-user capabilities and training analytics and assessment tools.
Joe Michaels, the Chief Revenue Officer of HaptX, says that the company’s technology is “uniquely suited” to work with the U.S. Army’s training programs, and feel that the the gloves will be able to “increase the effectiveness of mixed reality training for military and civilian healthcare professionals.”
We’ve seen a lot of different approaches to solving VR haptics over the past few years. It’s safe to say that Wireality is unlike any other, though.
Revealed earlier this month from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Future Interfaces Group, Wireality attaches spring-loaded cables to your fingers a little like a puppet. Connected to a shoulder-mounted device, the kit works with a given VR world to sense when your hand is about to come into contact with a virtual object and stop your fingers in the relevant position.
The aim is to give you the illusion of, say, resting your hand on a wall or wrapping your fingers around a railing. Check it out in the video below. It’s like VR haptics by way of puppetry.
This approach, the researchers say, has a lot of benefits. For starters, the system locks your fingers in place when touching a virtual object, but doesn’t require more power to keep it there. Researchers say it uses 0.024 mWh per actuation.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the entire system was created using less than $35 worth of components, whereas other VR haptics systems currently cost in the thousands.
But, fairly obviously, there’s a lot of hurdles for Wireality to overcome. A lot of what makes consumer VR haptics tough is making it simple and accessible for users. Hooking up an array of cables to your digits and mounting a device to your shoulder before putting on a headset is anything but convenient. It’s also bound to limit how freely you can move your hands in VR, which isn’t something we’d be quick to trade-off.
Plus the system can only apply the illusion of touching a surface to a few parts of the hand; if you were to press your hand flat against a wall, say, you wouldn’t actually feel it on most of your palm with the current setup.
But it’s certainly an interesting avenue for future research.
Korea-based TEGway, developers of a haptic accessory which generates hot and cold temperatures with impressively low latency, plans to launch a wearable VR thermal haptic dev kit aim in March. We got to try the latest prototype this week at CES 2020.
At CES 2020 this week Tegway showed off its latest tech, this time a prototype of an upcoming development kit focused on VR. The prototype consists of five parts: two ‘gloves’, two ‘sleeves’, and a forehead-mounted unit which brings temperature fluctuations to your face. Unlike an earlier prototype which was hooked up with big cables, these units were all powered by small, integrated batteries.
Forehead mounted thermal haptic modules | Photo by Road to VR
The company showed a rudimentary but functional VR demo using the ThermoReal dev kit with an HTC Vive. In the demo, a character throws fireballs or snowballs at you; the gloves on each hand would respond with the appropriate temperature effect depending upon which was thrown and which hand you blocked the ball with. If the fireball or snowball hit you in the face, you’d feel the temperature on your face thanks to the forehead-mounted haptic unit.
Photo by Road to VR
The demo also demonstrated an interesting haptic effect which, while it made use of temperature differences, conveyed something different than simply hot or cold. In the demo you could expand a light shield on your hand which would block the incoming projectiles and disperse their energy across the shield. The glove and sleeve haptics responded by quickly alternating between hot and cold, creating a ‘force’ sensation that was really interesting; the feeling of hot and cold spreading rapidly over my arm created a unique feeling that could be used for more general haptic feedback than simply indicating which things are hot and cold.
Tegway’s ThermoReal tech is a flexible thermoelectric generator based on something called the Seebeck Effect which creates a temperature differential based on electric current.
The haptic effect isn’t as fast as you’d expect from something like rumble haptics, but I was very surprised at just how quickly (and to what extent) the device was capable of achieving a meaningful sensation of hot and cold.
When it came to the ‘heat’ effect, the device got hot enough at times that I was worried that I’d have to rip it off if it got any hotter. When I had tried the tech back in 2017, I asked one of the creators if there was any risk of injury and was told that the device would only get up to 4°C hotter than body temperature. Based on how hot it felt, I’m still skeptical of that claim, though it’s possible that the rate of heat increase (rather than the measured temperature itself) could signal to my brain a more severe sensation of heat.
The ‘cold’ effect was the fastest in terms of latency and impressively quick at that. It didn’t reach uncomfortable levels of cold, but was enough to feel like I was gripping an ice cube.
Photo by Road to VR
Thermoelectric generators like ThermoReal are not new. What is new, says TEGway, is the form-factor of their device. It takes the form of a flexible skin-like array of conductors which can be curved and wrapped around various surfaces, which could make it perfect for integration into VR controllers, gloves, or even suits.
To that end, TEGway plans to launch its first development kit in March. The kit includes the gloves, sleeves, and forehead module; the company is targeting a $1,000 price point for the dev kit.
Photo by Road to VR
While the gloves and sleeves offered a convincing demo of the tech, it’s clear that thermal haptics would be much more viable if integrated into the things that VR users are already holding or wearing (like controllers and headsets). Various other haptic devices, trackers, and the like, which require players to put on additional accessories each time they play, have faced significant adoption challenges. As a separate ‘wearable’ accessory, ThermoReal would likely be relegated to non-consumer use-cases like training, rehabilitation, simulation, and maybe out-of-home VR attractions.
FundamentalVR has expanded its VR surgical simulation platform to include new procedures and a new scoring system, integrated with its HapticVR technology to help train surgeons around the world.
The Fundamental Surgery platform combines VR experiences with realistic haptic feedback through a pen-shaped peripheral, that can simulate the pressure felt when performing surgery on skin, bones and all the other icky stuff. Jamie tried the technology back in August, and although the realism of the haptics kind of freaked him out, he “couldn’t imagine a better tool for training surgeons.”
FundamentalVR has announced that it’s expanding the simulation to offer a new Facetectomy procedure, centered around the vertebrae and decompression of spinal nerve roots.
The company stated that this “lets trainees and surgeons practice the surgical procedure through an immersive, self-directed experience where they can remove a volume of bone material piece-by-piece, anywhere on the joint.” The new procedure also uses eye-tracking, which was implemented into Fundemental Surgery’s platform a few months ago.
The graphics for the procedure look quite realistic and gruesome too, as you can see above. There’s no doubt that this technology is one of the best examples of how VR can help educate in industries such as healthcare.
FundamentalVR has also implemented a scoring system that will debut in the Facetectomy procedure. This system will give a percentage score on each session, based on how well users meet objectives for the procedure, which it hopes will facilitate independent learning.
