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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
Hands On
You may be able to feel it but that doesn't mean it's real
By ADI IGNATIUS
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Red Dog Studio for TIME.
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I like to touch. I love hands-on museums with buttons to push and shapes to manipulate. I've often wondered why traditional museums—the Louvre, for example, or the Met—don't allow visitors to touch all of the displays. Sure, Renoir's Bathers might end up with a few chocolate stains and that dingyao white-china bowl from the Song dynasty might get a few chips. But aren't those small prices to pay for allowing people a chance to get touchy-feely with the world's best artworks?
O.K., this is stupid. But what if technology could digitally capture precise shapes and textures and allow us to "feel" them as if we were handling them directly? That goal is helping to spur research in the field of "haptics," the art of virtual touch.
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At the University of Southern California's Fisher Gallery in Los Angeles, experts are creating special 3-D images of the museum's Chinese teapot collection via laser photography. The pots can then be "touched" by anyone, anywhere—as long as they have some fancy (and still fairly bulky) equipment like the Phantom, produced by SensAble Technologies Inc. of Woburn, Massachusetts. A stylus attached to the desktop device transmits force feedback to the user's fingertips. Following a model on your computer screen, you run the stylus over the "body" of the virtual teapot in the air and feel its curved, slick exterior. Move upward and you sense the contour of the rim.
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Virtual Technologies' CyberGrasp allows users to touch objects in cyberspace.
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Then there's CyberGrasp. Slip onto your hand what its makers, Virtual Technologies Inc. of Palo Alto, California, call a "lightweight unencumbering force-reflecting exoskeleton." I'd suggest it's more like a "twitching, cumbersome bionic-man device," but, then, p.r. isn't really my thing. That said, I like what it lets me do. On a computer screen a 3-D image of a ball appears as well as a representation of my hand, which I control by moving the big, spiderlike exoskeleton I'm wearing. As I manipulate the ball, the fingertips of the CyberGrasp sense the force feedback via a network of artificial tendons. I "feel" the ball as I bat it through cyberspace. There are flaws: the hand sometimes goes through the object. But it's a thrill touching something that isn't there.
There are serious applications, too, like virtual-reality job training, computer-aided design and remote handling of hazardous materials. And, of course, fooling around with great works of art. "The golden rule is, Don't touch," says Margaret McLaughlin, the principal investigator for the haptics project at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center. "We're trying to change that."
Related Sites
Virtual Technologies
USC Integrated Media Systems Center
SensAble Technologies
USC InterActive Art Museum
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