Further Idea Discussions - Workshop 2

This week's workshop gave my group the opportunity to further discuss our ideas and also try out some hardware. Available was an Ardiuno Kit, Intel Galileo, Kinect Sensor, Leap Motion and Oculus Rift.

The initial ideas we went into the workshop with were discussed with the group. Following from my previous blog post, we discussed customised virtual keyboards and smart pens. Between the brainstorming workshop and this week, my team and I carried out a review of the literature that exists at the moment relating to both our ideas. It was exciting to see that there had been lots of research into the areas that we were exploring.

 A paper we discussed is "Towards Keyboard Independent Touch Typing in VR" - Kuester et al. 2005. The paper described a glove that uses Bluetooth and pressure sensors placed on the fingertips of the user to detect letters (QWERTY layout). After further investigation, we found an updated version of what began as the research paper. A press article is available at this link: Kitty virtual keyboard solution.

Following this research, we decided that the idea we thought was novel had in-fact already been done. We could not see any good way of improving this further and so decided to move on from this idea.

We fell into a similar situation with the smart pen idea. "Increasing Viscosity and Inertia Using a Robotically Controlled Pen Improves Handwriting in Children " - Hilla Ben-Pazi et al. 2010 describes a device that children hold to try and improve their handwriting. The device is capable of increasing the apparent inertia and viscosity of the pen to aid in handwriting. "Teaching to Write Japanese Characters using a Haptic Interface" - Solis, J. 2002 also describes a device that is capable of interpreting actions and exerting a more intelligent force feedback strategy. The system is able to identify the action to be performed by the user and then emulates the presence of a human tutor which feedbacks forces to the student.

The idea we finally settled on is a wearable ring device that is worn on a finger that uses ultrasound (to be explored further) and other sensors to detect interactions that can then be used as input to a device such as Google Glass. This allows for discreet operation of another device.