Seminar on Mid-air Haptics and Displays

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Abstract: One of the visions on my research is to deliver novel visual and tactile experiences to users without instrumenting them with wearable or head-mounted displays. My team has been exploring various technical solutions to create displays that use air as the diffuser surface to project visual content and haptic systems that use air pressure to create tactile feedback. For example, Ultrahaptics is our haptic feedback system that uses acoustic radiation forces to create tactile stimulations in multiple locations of the hand. This feedback is created in mid-air – so users don’t have to touch or hold any device to experience it. We can further extend the acoustic radiation forces to trap objects in mid-air to create different acoustic levitation patterns that can serve as mid-air displays. While we have primarily exploited phased arrays to achieve these, we are now also looking at using fabricated meta-material structures to achieve the same. In this talk, I will present some of our recent projects on this topic and conclude with the use of acoustic meta-materials to create displays based on levitation.

Bio: 

Sriram Subramanian is a Professor of Informatics at the University of Sussex (UK) where he leads a research group on novel interactive systems. His research interest is in human-computer interaction with a particular emphasis on creating novel user-interfaces. Before joining Sussex, he was a Professor of Human-computer Interaction at the University of Bristol (till July 2015) and prior to this a senior scientist at Philips Research Labs in the Netherlands. Subramanian is also the co-founder of Ultrahaptics a spin-out company that aims to commercialise the mid-air haptics enabled by his research. In 2016, Ultrahaptics won the Royal Academy of Engineering award for outstanding contributions to engineering in the last 4 yrs.