Remember Nintendo’s Robotic Operating Buddy, better known as R.O.B.? He was a charming but ill-fated concept, released in the mid-80’s as a robotic second player for some Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) titles. R.O.B. may now be gone, but his spirit lives on in this new VR project.
Scott Devin is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As recently reported by Digital Trends, he’s come up with an interesting new experiment that uses a $25,000 Baxter robot to help further immerse you within VR experiences. By linking the machine up with an HTC Vive, Devin has been able to create input mechanisms that give you the expected resistance within the virtual world, something that’s sorely missing from today’s most popular position-tracked controllers and gamepads.
Devin calls this concept ‘Encounter Haptics’ and you can see it in action in a brilliant video above. It’s a simple demonstration; within VR Devin selects one of three different weights: light, medium, and heavy. He then approaches three wooden blocks and reaches out for them with one of the Vive’s wands. In the real world, the Baxter robot also reaches out with one arm to meet him approximately where the block is in the virtual world. As Devin pushes the block in VR, the robot applies the appropriate amount of resistance corresponding to the selected weight.
In other words, it doesn’t put up much of a fight for the light blocks, but causes a strain for the heavy ones.
Even with such expensive machinery involved, this is a primitive setup that provides just a glimpse of a potential solution to the haptic feedback issue that many – including Oculus – are trying to solve. It’s clearly not intended for consumer use but it does present the idea that, one day, we could have an adaptive machine that provides much-needed feedback for experiences like sword fighting or block building. That said, you’d need something that was able to circle around you rather than simply sit in front of you.
As with most VR solutions, then, it presents a whole new set of problems.
At the very least, maybe we’ll see the Baxter robot make a cameo in the Oculus version of Super Smash Bros in 20 years from now.
