Disney Creates New Mid-Air Haptic Technology 62
An anonymous reader sends word of a new technology from Disney called AIREAL, featured at this year's SIGGRAPH 2013 conference in Anaheim, CA. It's designed to give tactile sensations to people who are using motion control devices. The device can track a target, like a user's hand, and send a compressed ring of air quickly through the intervening space to provide haptic feedback. They say the device is both inexpensive and scalable. Several of its parts are easily 3-D printed.
3D Boobs (Score:1, Insightful)
Title says it all. I predict this will be one of the first commercial applications of this wonderful new technology.
AIREAL + Oculus Rift would be amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is there a way to make a REVERSE air puff? (Score:2, Insightful)
tl;dr: You can't push on a rope, and nature abhors a vacuum.
You can easily create an underpressure wave by moving an object through a fluid. The region of underpressure follows behind the object, as the object has temporarily moved all the fluid out of the way. However, as soon as the object passes, the fluid rushes in to fill the underpressure region.
Acoustic overpressure (aka fucking loud sounds) destroys eardrums just fine. Any sound loud enough to shake the air back and forth to the point where bubbles of vacuum appear is already loud enough to cause damage.
Torpedoes destroy ships with an explosion followed by an imploding cavitation bubble. The hull may very well survive the initial explosion and shrapnel impact, but the explosion has pushed the water away from the ship's hull. The water rushes back into the resulting near-vacuum with peak pressure at impact. From the point of view of any hull-building material outside the realm of fiction, the overpressure from the collapsing bubble can be adequately described as "too much".
You cannot create an underpressure wave in the wake of nothing. If you generate a region of vacuum through cavitation (rapidly move two parallel plates apart in a fluid, or spin a propeller too quickly and have its tips move faster than the fluid's surface tension can hold together, or anger a mantis shrimp), the fluid immediately rushes in on the vacuum from all sides. Vacuums can only pull; they cannot push.
Powerful sonars can cause injury in animals caught within their beams (cf. whales with suspicious pressure-induced trauma) where the nulls in the sound waves hitting their body are basically vacuum. However, the nulls are caused by 210+ dB sound pressure levels piling up the fluid molecules around them. Just for fun, I tried to come up with an analogy for this kind of sound pressure level that sounds better than "standing a short distance from an explosion", but all I ended up with was sitting slightly inside the exhaust of a large modern turbofan engine with a three-piece rock band whose speakers and amps happen to be powered by the other three engines, and they're all having a nice heavy jam.
You can push on a rope if you can get the entire rope to start moving in the direction you want. So maybe instead of focusing on vacuum, you should focus on warping space-time. Or a pulley