Video: What next for touchless technology?

Breakthrough technologies are likely to radically alter the way people interact with devices.

Professor Sriram Subramanian, of the University of Bristol in the UK and a speaker at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014, explains his cutting-edge work, which allows us to have a rich experience of touch without making any physical contact with a device.

Here are some quotes from the clip. You can watch the full video at the top of this page.

On going touch-free

I can give you tactile feedback – so the feeling of touch even though you are not touching any device.

This device lets you feel tactile sensations at distances of 4cm, or even 2 metres away as well. And it’s not a single point of touchless feeling – so it’s not one finger that you feel, but your whole hand, or shapes, as well.

What are Ultrahaptics?

Ultrahaptics is a touchless tactile feedback system that we’ve built. By ‘tactile system’, what I mean is that you can have the feeling of touch on your fingertips or on your palm without touching or wearing anything. So there’s no instrumentation of the user required. You don’t have to wear any gloves, you don’t have to have any wearables on you, but you still feel tactile sensations in mid-air.

It’s the same as when you go to a concert or a nightclub. The loud music, the bass: you feel it in your chest. It’s the same sensation that we’re exploiting here. Instead of using the bass of a speaker, we use ultrasound, which is a much higher frequency and therefore, instead of targeting the whole chest, we can target specific locations on your fingertip or your palm.

On the realism of the interaction

It’s not just that we give you a single point, and this point has no other information except functional to let you know there’s something here. But actually we can encode a lot more information in this point. What this means is that people can actually have a rich vocabulary to describe this tactile sensation.

If I change the rate at which this point turns on and off, how fast I turn it on and off gives people a lot of information on what it feels like. For example, if I turn it on and off slowly, then you feel like something is pulsing, like it’s breathing. Or if I do it fast, it feels like something is flowing on your hand. So, you can create all these sensations.

We can do up to 100 feedback points. And the great thing about this number of points is that you can start feeling shapes. We can generate all kinds of shapes when you move your hand and you can start projecting so many things on your hand.

On the uses of touchless interactions

So, where do you see touchless interactions? Imagine you’re doing a home DIY project: you’re working in the garden or you’re doing a painting job and your hands are dirty, then your phone rings, or you want to turn off the cooker.’

If you’re in a surgery situation, it might be useful as well, or in a car. Today there’s a lot of interest in the motor industry to move towards a touchless dashboard. The idea being you can keep your eyes on the road and you can wave your hand vaguely in the location where your dashboard is and you can turn the volume knob up or if you want to change radio stations you can do that.

We’ve integrated Ultrahaptics into the headrest of the car, so you get a buzz on your neck when there’s someone in the blind spot when you’re turning left, or on the right of your neck when you’re turning right.

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Author: Sriram Subramanian is a Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the Computer Science Department of Bristol University, UK.

Image: A staff member of NTT DoCoMo Inc wears a head-mounted “intelligent glass” in Chiba, east of Tokyo, September 30, 2013. REUTERS/Yuya Shino