Aireal, a new project from Disney Research, uses air to let you feel digital objects. Photo: Disney Research The tiny boxes use specially designed nozzles to shoot vortices of air at the user. Photo: Disney Research It could let you feel the fluttering of a virtual butterfly projected on your hand. Photo: Disney Research Or simulate the feeling of virtual seagulls in a videogame swooping down behind you. Photo: Disney Research But it's not all about simulating virtual stuff. It could lend crucial haptic heft to motion-sensing navigation. Photo: Disney Research A sampling of the nozzles tested. Photo: Disney Research The system is highly scalable, with each unit comprised largely of 3-D printed parts. Photo: Disney Research It's accurate, too. Photo: Disney Research

>Aireal could provide tangible feedback that's utterly natural.

If you've ever played with one of those plastic air cannons, you'll get the general idea. Aireal is basically a miniature, computer-controlled version of the same thing. It's a small box, made largely of 3-D printed parts, that fires tiny vortices of air at users, generating objects that feel like they're there, even though they aren't. At a point when motion-sensing technologies like Kinect and Leap Motion are encouraging us to wave our hands in front of our screens like lunatics, Aireal could provide the real, tangible, physical feedback that makes it all feel utterly natural.

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That's just one of the applications envisioned by Raj Sodhi, the lead researcher on the project. The demo video shows how it might work in a videogame where you play as a soccer goalie. Instead of just moving your hands around to deflect the shots on-screen, Aireal pairs each ball with a blast of air, bridging that awkward chasm between the digital world and the physical experience. It's one big step closer to actually interacting with an object, instead of just pantomiming it. And since all it involves is air, it doesn't require any additional gear on the part of the user.

But if connecting a single Aireal box to a videogame is neat, combining a few is something closer to magic. The video shows how precisely choreographed units could work in unison, firing back and forth to let you feel a virtual butterfly tickling your skin, or pounding you all at once to mimic a flock of seagulls swooping overhead. It's not hard to see how the technology could add a whole new sensorial dimension to the already transportive virtual worlds of Oculus Rift, or dramatically heighten a visit to one of Disneyland's immersive attractions. In fact, my beloved Imagineers knew there was potential here back in the '90s. With their clever "4-D" moviegoing experiences like the now-defunct Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!, they paired on-screen entertainment with real-world stimuli, whacking at your legs with something under your seat, for instance, to simulate the feeling of critters running underfoot. With Aireal, that concept is expanded from a single, gotcha gimmick to a haptic component that could augment any digital experience.

>There are several dimensions of the vortex we can use to design distinct sensations.

The design relies on the vortex–a unique, naturally occuring phenomenon–to keep the air moving stably and consistently, but that doesn't mean Aireal's limited pummeling you floating rings. In addition to the possibilities that come with the multiple-unit setup, there's plenty of room for the experience to be tweaked. "There are several dimensions of the vortex we can use to design distinct sensations," Sodhi says. The strength of the vortex, the speed at which they're shot, and their waveforms can all be played with to create a variety of invisible objects and phantom sensations. Earlier this year, physicists at the University of Chicago made news by generating knotted vortices that untangled themselves as they moved through a tank of water. "That is certainly within our capabilities to do it in mid-air," Sodhi says. "Playing with different shapes and finding structures for doing multiple vortices from one unit is a big part of our future exploration."

Still, Sodhi thinks Aireal's most exciting when it's paired with visuals, like those soccer balls or seagulls. The invisible, fleeting objects aren't necessarily a revelation on their own. But when they're adding tactile heft to something you're already seeing, the effect can be transformative. "Our users get so immersed in the experience of feeling these very expressive tactile sensations that they don't realize it's just air hitting them," he says.

Sodhi developed Aireal at Disney Research Pittsburgh, which shares space with Carnegie Melon, a robotics and human-interactions powerhouse. One of his collaborators there is Ivan Poupyrev, the interaction whiz whose own recent Disney Research project, Touché, makes brilliant use of some simple sensors to make any physical object–a leaf, a doorknob, a book, or a puddle of water–touch-sensitive. Sodhi, Poupyrev, and their fellow researchers are currently exploring all sorts of possibilities for Aireal–incorporating it into large-scale augmented environments, baking it into telepresence gizmos, and even distributing units around our living rooms, like 5.1 surround sound speakers–but in each case, it's only one sensory component of a larger, far more ambitious project. What they really want, Sodhi explains, is to tear down the boundaries between the physical and digital altogether. To make the entire world interactive. "Haptic feedback is one very important piece of that vision," Sodhi says. Without it we're just flailing at our TVs. But if Aireal can trick us into thinking otherwise, that will be a very real design triumph.