Simulators are a common way to train when gaining skills that are dangerous or difficult to practice for real. Pilots, for example, do lots of training on flight simulators. Doctors also use simulators to train for surgery, and the simulators are increasingly accurate. They can even make it feel like you’re working on the real thing by giving you feedback through your sense of touch: haptics. Practicing sinus or eye surgery and your practice sessions will feel real, for example. Haptics can help not just doctors, but vets training too – and it can help not just in the head but, errr, at the other end too.
Trainee vets have to learn how to feel for animals’ organs. In small animals like dogs and cats you can do that just by feeling the outside of their tummies, but in larger animals like cows or horses you have to actually put your hands inside them. That’s right, up there. Now the thing is, this is a very difficult thing to learn how to do properly. A teacher can’t demonstrate it, because the student can’t see what they’re doing. Likewise when the student tries it, the teacher can’t see to know if they’re doing it right. Usually they just rely on describing what they’re doing (and how the animal reacts, of course).
Fortunately for teacher, student and especially animal, Sarah Baillie and her colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College invented a simulator called the Haptic Cow. It’s a haptic model of a cow’s rear end, complete with ‘Ouchometer’ – a graph that shows whether the student’s movements are too gentle to be effective, just right, or too rough to be safe. By using the Haptic Cow, students get an accurate idea of what they’ll be doing in their real jobs, the teachers can see better feedback of how well the student’s doing, and real cows don’t have to worry about being practised on. For doctors, vets and their patients, haptics are helping to make sure that practice doesn’t have to mean petrifying.
When we watch a film, it’s not just the pictures that make the experience, it’s the soundtrack too. The music and sound effects play a big part in setting the mood of a film. They matter. If you are to get the sinking feeling in your stomach or feel the shivers down your spine, it’s probably the music. QMUL’s Antonella Mazzoni wondered if other senses could contribute too … and designed a Mood Glove to find out.
Vibrations
We use touch as well as sight and sound to sense the world. This kind of ‘haptic feedback’ is used, for example, in phones that vibrate to tell us someone is calling. Antonella wondered if haptic feedback could heighten our mood while watching films in the way sounds do. To test her ideas she created a series of gloves. They had simple electronics built in to them that caused small pads to vibrate against the hand. She could control the order they vibrated and also the strength and frequency of the vibration. Early experiments showed it was best to make the pads vibrate on the back of the hand: when placed on the palm they tended to tickle too much. She also found that the positions of the vibrations did not make a big difference to moods, so she placed them in a simple circle.
Moods
Our moods and emotion can be broken into two parts: our levels of ‘arousal’ and of ‘valence’. Arousal is to do with the intensity of the mood. Being angry, delighted, alarmed and excited are all high arousal moods, whereas being bored, tired, sleepy and calm are low arousal ones. Valence is instead about the level of pleasure involved. High valence moods are pleasant and include being delighted, happy or calm, whereas low valence moods are unpleasant, such as being afraid, annoyed, depressed or bored. Together they give a standard way to rate mood.
Antonella next collected lots of film clips for use in her experiments. A series of volunteers watched the clips while wearing the glove and rated the experience in terms of their arousal and valence while watching them. Using these ratings as a baseline, she then ran experiments to explore if, and how, different kinds of vibration in the glove changed the wearer’s mood while watching the clips.
Suspense
In one experiment, she investigated suspense. Suspense is where the audience knows something about the plot that the characters don’t, leading to a gradual buildup of tension or expectation. Suspense can be linked to both positive and negative feelings so is not specifically about valence. It involves gradually increasing arousal. It is something that the score of a film can make a big difference to: transforming a clip with little suspense to one full of it. Antonella wondered if our sense of touch, through her Mood Glove, could deliver a similar enhancement? Perhaps, for example, a gradually building pattern of vibration on our hand could increase the build-up of arousal and so suspense. To find out, she chose 60 film clips that involved suspense. Volunteers rated them in terms of valence and arousal, and she used the 16 with most agreement. These final choices included clips from films like Inception, North by Northwest and Gravity.
Effects
Volunteers experienced heightened levels of suspense
Next she designed some simple effects to test. In her ‘buildup’ effect there was a gradual increase of both the strength and frequency of the vibration. The ‘fade in’ effect just increased the strength of the vibrations, starting from nothing and building to a peak. She also created an illusion that the effect moved across the hand, using the different vibration pads. A new set of volunteers watched the chosen film clips while wearing the glove. It gave different vibration patterns in time to each film. They rated their mood while watching the clips and Antonella also interviewed them about the experience afterwards. She found that the volunteers did experience heightened levels of suspense from certain kinds of vibration patterns for some clips. What worked differed for different clips suggesting a need to design the effect to fit the film.
Jobs
New technology creates new jobs that didn’t previously exist. You can see this in the ever increasing lengths of the credits of films, as new kinds of special effects lead to new jobs. Perhaps in future there will be a new career to follow as a `haptic composer’ for films, just as there are currently jobs composing soundtracks.
Perhaps it could be the job for you!
– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London(from the archive)
These days art and high technology don’t mix much. Personal gadgets are one thing, jewellery quite another. That hasn’t always been the case though and hopefully it won’t be in the future. The tactful watch also shows how tech accessible to blind people can have other uses too.
In the 18th century there was a mobile revolution just like the current one. Back then the technology wasn’t the smart watch or MP3 player but the pocket watch. The 18th century watchmakers weren’t just innovators though they were also artists and craftsmen. The result was truly exquisite jewellery that was also highly functional.
One of the absolute masters was Abraham Louis Breguet. Born in Switzerland, he set up business in Paris and was to become one of the greatest innovators ever. His clients included the likes of Marie-Antoinette, King George IV of Britain, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Rather than build lots of identical watches he constantly tinkered with the designs. The result was that he is responsible for some of the most important innovations in clock technology. Many of his inventions were technical advances such as the first self-winding watch. He realised the importance of making his designs easy to use too though. A Breguet watch, made for the Queen of Naples, for example, was the first to be worn on the wrist!
In the 21st century we are just getting to grips with new ways of interacting with our personal gadgets. People have realised that basing mobile device designs on what works for a desktop PC is not so sensible. When on the move it’s not that convenient to have to look at a screen. Consequentially we are undergoing a revolution in multimodal computing. It involves finding ways of using our other senses not just sight to interact with computers. The way your phone vibrates in your pocket is one simple example – tactile computing, delivering information through your sense of touch.
Clever as we are Breguet was way ahead of us though. At the turn of the 18th century it was not considered polite to look at your watch in public. Breguet’s solution was the tact watch: a watch that allowed you to check the time without taking it out of your pocket. Tactile and tactful computing! His solution was of course (in all senses) incredibly elegant. It would also have been a great design for the blind and partially sighted – showing how designing for one use can have others too.
Round the edge were 12 evenly spaced diamond studs, with larger ones at the 3, 6, 9 and 12 positions. On the outside was an arrow. It did not move on its own like a normal clock hand, though. That wouldn’t really work inside a pocket without a glass case and then it couldn’t be touched. Hidden inside the case was an actual clock. When the owner wanted to tactfully check the time they would just spin the arrow until they felt resistance. That meant the arrow was now back in synchrony with the real hour hand. They could then count round the diamond studs to work out its position and so the time.
One of the most stunningly beautiful tact watches was made for Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France in 1800. Two centuries later it sold at Chrysties for over $1.3 million.. The best we seem to be able to do in the 21st century is to just dip an iPod in gold and coat it with diamonds. The result: not 18th century elegance, just very expensive 21st century bling.
Artists and jewellers are starting to work with scientists and engineers again though so maybe our modern gadgets can follow the path of the watch and become elegant jewellery too.
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