TeleTouch

Final Product

Glove, Model Hand, and App

Glove

The glove has 20 linear resonant actuators on its palm. The wires connect to a Raspberry Pi with a servo hat, all contained in a 3D-printed wrist mount. The glove's linear resonant actuators vibrate at different frequencies to mimic different pressures in a sense of touch.

Model Hand

The model hand had 20 pressure sensors on its palm cut up from Eeontex pressure sensing fabric. Each sensor has two wires zig-zagged across each side, and leads to our PCB, which contains 20 RC circuits to read analog resistance with the Raspberry Pi. The resistance of the sensor changes when the sensor is pressed, and that value is relayed with the Raspberry Pi.

App

The Android app uses a pressure level slider and your touch on the hand in the screen to mimic touching the hand. The app also has a recording capability that allows you to play back a touch later.

Concept + Motivation

Impact and Need

Haptic technology recreates the sense of touch by applying, forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. With current technology, it's easy to remotely control appliances with simple on/off switches, but we are far from recreating a realistic experience in interacting with a virtual world. With TeleTouch, we hope to recreate the feeling of a human touch.

TeleTouch is a remote communication device that enables users to interact by touching and feeling with their hands. Our project utilizes pressure sensors on a fabricated model hand that detect a touch from one person, and controls a glove's Linear Resonant Actuators in real-time to simulate the touch on the other person. We aim to explore effective and believable methods of tactile feedback to deliver one of the most sensitive human interactions remotely.

Competitive Analysis

Related and similar products

GloveOne

GloveOne is a haptic glove designed to feel objects in VR. The gloves transfer data using either a low latency USB connection or via Bluetooth. The glove vibrates with varying intensities and frequencies to recreate touch sensations for the user. The glove uses Leap Motion and Intel RealSense and has a price tag for $200 for each glove, which is comparable to our price. GloveOne is not able to communicate long distances due to using a USB connection or Bluetooth, while we communicate over WiFi. The actuators for GloveOne and our design are similar since they both vibrate independently at different frequencies and intensities, but their design uses 10 actuators, while the size of ours allows us to use 40.

Hands Omni

Hands Omni is a haptic glove as well that uses inflatable bladders to simulate pressure on touch. Inflatable bladders may create a more realistic sense of physical pressure on the hand compared to vibrating actuators, but since the device relies on air compressions to drive interactions, the latency of the device is a huge hurdle for real-time interactions.

Pillow Talk

Pillow Talk is a wristband that picks up your heartbeat in real-time and sends it to your loved one. Like us, they want to use technology to bring people closer together through imitating human touch. However, we offer more intimate interaction by allowing a person to control the touch they send to their loved one.

Use Cases

Why are we making this? Because the possibilities are endless.

Long-Distance Comfort: Recreating a loved one's touch can bring back the intimacy to long-distance relationships.

Biometric for Personal Identification: Measuring someone's handshake can be used as a method of authentication.

Medical Device: Precision applications could benefit from recreating a surgeon's touch remotely.

Multi-player Gaming: Players could interact with each other in a new form of gameplay.

Requirements

Expectations

Functional

Enacting touch

Collect data about where the user has touched the model hand using pressure sensors.

Receiving touch

Use Linear Resonant Actuators to send haptic feedback to the corresponding areas on glove where the model hand was touched.

Pressure

Accurately reflect different levels of pressure on the model hand onto the user's glove.

Communication

The interaction should be able to take place no matter the distance in-between as long as both the hand and glove are connected to Wi-Fi.

Power

Both the glove and the model hand should be recharge-able via USB cable.

Non-Functional

Real-time

After a touch is enacted on model hand, the glove must receive the touch within 2 seconds.

Energy-efficient

Both the glove and the model hand should maintain battery life of at least 2 hours.

Natural

Users should feel that the pressure applied to their hand by the glove feels similar to the amount of pressure someone touching their hand would apply.