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Today'south virtual reality product landscape has come to resemble something of a Wild Westward show, with steely eyed robber barons jockeying for position confronting basement cowboys and almost anyone with aspirations of tech glory. The results have ranged from the deeply ludicrous to the truly inspired. As we stride into the uncertain mural of 2017, we await back on the strides taken towards immersive VR and run across if we tin can't catch the scent of where things are headed in the year alee.

Since the dawn of virtual reality, in that location have been those who dreamed of something grander. Phone call it virtual reality on steroids, the Matrix, or simply Reality 2.0. Whatever moniker yous prefer, the idea is the same — to take VR beyond the headset and inject the entire human sensorium into a virtual globe. The industry term most often mentioned in this regard is haptics and relates to the sense of touch. You could even say the sense of touch is fifty-fifty more essential to immersive VR than sound. Plenty of folks become by in life without the aid of their ears, merely few can manage without the sense of bear upon.

Late in 2014, ExtremeTech reported on one of the early devices to brand a splash in VR haptics – an ultrasonic haptic interface created at the Academy of Bristol. The technology promised to use ultrasound to create invisible 3D objects that could be felt, but not seen. While certainly headline grabbing, several hurdles augur against ultrasonic haptic ever becoming mainstream — not the least which seems to be that it merely doesn't piece of work that well. ExtremeTech's David Cardinal had a run a risk to test the device at CES and reported that the sense of touch produced by the speaker array used in Bristol style interface was far from convincing.

What's more than, it's problematic to see how one could always position plenty ultrasonic speakers to let touching objects in 360 degrees. Nigh of the demos of ultrasonic haptics feature a small assortment of speakers the size of a couple table napkins, positioned directly in front of the user. What happens when you want to bear on something behind, beneath, or on tiptop of you? This question was never answered sufficiently to convince me that ultrasonic haptics will always deliver the kind of sensation required to really be commercially successful. And then while ultrasonic haptics may yet get a staple of magic shows and sketchy psychic parlors, I wouldn't hold my breath for such a rig to appear on the shelves at Best Buy any time soon.

teslasuit

Artists rendering of the Teslasuit, a total trunk haptic solution. Epitome credit: Teslasuit

Of far greater promise is the haptic torso suit. Already several commercial players have established a embankment caput in this nascent field, including AxonVR and Teslasuit. While similar in advent, haptic body suits can vary widely in the mechanism for delivering the sensation of bear upon. The Teslasuit resembles a kind of fortified ski garment, and is surprisingly elegant for beingness the brain child of a Kickstarter team. To provide the hallmark sensation of bear on the unit of measurement uses neuromuscular stimulation, the aforementioned mild localized electric shocks found in abdominal edifice devices and physical therapy TENS units. The suit is laced with thin electrically conducting textile that delivers mild stimulation to necessary torso regions when simulating touch in a virtual earth.

I of the challenges Teslasuit faces is rallying enough developer support around its Software Development Kit to provide meaningful applications for its garment. Similar and then many gadgets of hope, unless there is sufficient software in the wild making utilise of the new tech, the fruit is likely to wither upon the vine.

exoskeleton

The HaptX Exoskeleton aims to provide users with a fully immersive VR experience. Image credit: AxonVR

The Teslasuit'due south major competition comes from a hungry picayune startup chosen AxonVR, whose 25 yr onetime founder Jake Rubin states his goal as making virtual reality indistinguishable from reality. This is clearly big talk from a pocket-size shop, but having recently received a windfall of $5 million in seed funding, AxonVR volition have a gamble to prove it can run with the large dogs. Unlike the Teslasuit, the AxonVR haptic trunk adjust uses miniature pneumatic actuators to provide the sensation of touch across the torso. While heavier as a upshot, the AxonVR suit can deliver more distinct types of awareness. It does and then by separating the feeling of touch into two types, cutaneous touch and force feedback. Cutaneous touch on consists of localized sensations upon the skin, such as warmth and cold. In the AxonVR system, this is provided through a skintight HaptX garment.

For forcefulness feedback, AxonVR takes things a footstep farther. Using a HaptX exoskeleton, information technology aims to provide the more forceful sensations of touch that come up with say, walking up a flight of stairs or pushing against a large heavy object. To provide such sensation, the uncomplicated electrical stimulation of the kind found in the Teslasuit falls well brusk of the goal. For such situations, much stronger forces are needed, the kind found in pneumatic actuators of the type that ability the Phoenix SuitX'southward industrial and medical exoskeleton used to aid paralyzed individuals regain mobility.

Far from being just another take on the haptic bodysuit, the HaptX exoskeleton could be the most ambitious VR device presently in the works. Resembling a behemothic robotic arm from which a person dangles in infinite, the exoskeleton enables a person to traverse VR worlds in a fashion like to the ungainly hamster ball rigs and omnidirectional treadmills created for the same purpose. On paper at least, information technology'south an inspired two-in-i solution that solves both the outcome of force feedback and the issue of locomotion in i accident. This makes information technology my choice for the well-nigh groundbreaking immersive VR development of 2016, and the one we are almost likely to be call up in the years ahead. Fifty-fifty if AxonVR ultimately fails to make VR duplicate from reality, they almost certainly will have moved the brawl a giant pace in that direction.