Video: Augmented airgun lets you play virtual volleyball

Feel the (gentle) force (Image: Disney Research)

Video games let us play the role of soldier, sports legend, defender of the planet against alien invaders… but as we play those roles, we can’t reach out and touch any of it. How different would digital interactions be if you could feel a virtual butterfly settle on the back of your hand, or the thunk of a football as you deflect it away from goal?

A new haptic technology lets you do just that. Developed by Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the system, called Aireal, lets users feel virtual objects in the air in front of them, as well as giving tactile feedback on the kinds of gestures that might be used with devices like the Leap Motion. The system directs bursts of air to places in space which coincide with the virtual object being represented. Aireal works with a depth camera and whatever application is running to figure out where to direct the air, which it shoots out in doughnut-shaped vortices akin to fast, focused smoke rings.

In work due to be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, California, this week, the researchers explain that the frequency and strength of the air pulses can be modified to match the beating of a virtual butterfly’s wings on a person’s arm (see video, above). By combining multiple Aireals, the researchers let a video game player feel seagulls flapping around his head as he walked around.


There are many other possible applications. Tactile feedback in free air can let users know when their hand is in the gesture space of a device like Leap Motion. Aireal can even be directed at other objects in the environment, ruffling a newspaper page as a projected bird flies by, for example.

“As the technology matures, we envision that consumer electronic devices, as well as everyday environments, would have free-air haptic devices pre-installed and therefore become completely invisible to the users,” lead author Rajinder Sodhi suggests.