Researchers at the University of Bristol have come up with a new technology that lets people see and feel holograms with their bare hands.
The research, led by Dr Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah and Tom Carter from the University of Bristol, has led to the creation of a system that lets people see and feel 3-D shapes made out of air by using focused ultrasound.
“Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space are all possible ways of using this system,” said Dr Ben Long, Research Assistant from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) group.
The technology makes use of ultrasound to project 3-D haptic holograms. By focusing complex patterns of ultrasound, the air disturbances can be seen as floating 3D shapes. These shapes when added to 3D displays create something that can be seen and felt. The shapes can be viewed by directing the ultrasound at an oil film on water.
The researchers claim the new technology could have more practical applications, such as helping surgeons explore CT scans and feel tumors using haptic feedback.
“In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artefacts in a museum,” Long said.
The research paper, ‘Rendering volumetic haptic shapes in mid-air using ultrasound’, is published in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics. The paper is also being presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 this week.
