HaptX
HaptX
As society moves ever more into virtual reality, the element currently missing is the sense of touch. Without touch, virtual reality applications will struggle to gain market share beyond gaming. With a fully immersive experience – one that provides physical and tactile feedback – virtual reality can then expand to offer useful physical experiences.
The HaptX G1 Glove + Airpack is a lightweight, wearable glove/backpack system that provides force feedback and tactile feeling for fully immersive virtual reality experiences. Inside the Gloves are hundreds of microfluidic actuators that physically displace your skin, so when you touch and interact with virtual objects, the objects feel real. It has a flexible, integrated tendon system that applies up to 40 lbs of resistive force per hand, so you can feel the size and shape of virtual objects. This system is intended for enterprise usage and allows professionals to confidently and accurately perform tasks remotely, such as tele-robotics or remote surgery.
The Airpack is designed to be used as a body-worn backpack or as a tabletop computer. This modular orientation was crucial to solving engineering needs while balancing an intuitive user experience. Through observations, the development team realized it’s most natural for the user to place a backpack on its outer surface when removing it from your back. Therefore, the outward facing, aesthetic side of the backpack becomes the bottom side when placed on a table top, and the padded inner side of the backpack becomes the top, aesthetic side. The Left Hand Glove and Right Hand Glove also stay attached to their respective sides, with no need to remove or reattach them between configurations.
For pleasing aesthetics on both surfaces, we integrated an easy-to-use magnetic attachment for the backpack padding that works like magic. The padding structure aligns and secures itself in place in one second when the user lays the padding onto the Airpack while it’s sitting on a table. When the user wishes to remove the backpack and place it on the table top, the padded structure detaches easily by simply turning the 2 knobs inset in the shoulder area. Once those are released, simply tugging the padded structure downwards releases the bottom 2 attachments. This method is straightforward and takes only a few seconds to perform.
Our design team wanted the visual styling to reference the organic nature of the body, while not connoting a mech-warrior aesthetic. The hand and arm electronic housing designs are low profile, with shapes that relate to their relative body parts; the back-of-hand flares wide from the wrist and thumb forward, while the back-of-arm housing is long, narrow, and flares out, moving away from the wrist. A singular crisp line flows from the knuckles back through the arm housing to insinuate strength and internal musculature. This creased element visually connects the various components and intentionally aligns with the Airpack’s umbilical cable.
With diverse experience in industries ranging from consumer electronics, high-end audio, medical and life sciences, housewares and cycling, Anvil Studios is a product design company committed to bringing a broad range of solutions to the table.
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