Podcast Episode Details

Virtual Reality You Can Feel (w/ Greg Bilsland, HaptX)

Episode 56

We're joined for a special interview with Greg Bilsland of HaptX to talk about VR for Commerce and how touch in VR isn't as elusive as you may believe.
Impossible technology worth paying attention to now: how realistic haptics will add another dimension to our immersive experiences in retail and training.

What is HaptX?

• Jake Rubin founded HaptX in 2012. HaptX's vision is for a full body system to deliver realistic touch to VR users.

• The ultimate promise of virtual reality is to open up impossible worlds and experiences to you and experience them with unprecedented realism.

What is the specific definition of symbolic and realistic haptics?

• It's the science and Technology of touch.

• It's understanding how our body interacts with all the things around us.

• Most people experience it in your phone, the touchpad in your mouse, or the rumble in a gaming controller.

• Remember the Nintendo Rumble Pak? That was early haptics. That technology was an offset motor spinning around to create vibrational effect: that's symbolic haptics. It's only representing something happening in an abstract way.

• Realistic haptics delivers the actual sense of displacement on your skin when you touch something.

• Tactile feedback: Imagine putting your finger against the tines of a fork and you see all those points that are physically displacing on your finger. That's where you're actually feeling those points.

• Force feedback: imagine trying to bend a spoon: you're pushing on it and feeling resistance.

• Combine those two things and you get realistic haptics. A sense that you're touching a real object even though you're  in the virtual world.

This seems like far future technology, but you're talking about it as current technology. Where do the technologies come from and what are its current and practical uses?

• Jake Rubin found that you could leverage the current game engine tech, Unity and Unreal, to bring touch to them.

• It turns out is has huge implications across commerce and retail and training.

• Imagine flight simulators taking VR and using haptic gloves to utilize training for pilots.

• Any professional role that needs training can utilize haptics in VR.

What is the broad industry specific use of this tech? Is there anything currently existing? How do you see haptics being applied in the consumer space?

• Long term, haptic devices are going to make their way into the consumer space because VR will be part of retail experience.

• Short term, It's more of an enterprise tool.

• Companies doing commerce that benefit the most from haptic: a large physical space where consumers do their shopping or a large physical space they have to store something.

• Consider companies like Lowes and Home Depot. They have huge stores that are expensive to lease and keep tstocked.

• They're looking to VR to reduce that footprint so that their customers can have the whole store experience brought to them in a small package.

• Ikea is doing the same thing.

• You'll see more consumers using VR and haptics when at locations that can install VR and haptics.

What's your endgame goal for seeing retail applying haptics?

• The long term vision is doing things and navigating immersive environments using your hands instead of using cont

  ---

  Published on 7 years, 11 months ago