SenseGraphics Blog » H3DAPI

Haptics give ‘Sight’ to Wheelchair

alyx — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:39:42 +0000

With the use of haptic technology, an ordinary wheelchair is given the ability to ’see or feel’ by a team of researchers at the Luleå University of Technology. This electric wheelchair is able to sense its surroundings and transmits information to a person who is visually impaired. This is achieved by the use of SenseGraphics H3DAPI platform, a haptic robot to serve as a virtual walking cane, 3D laser scanner, and a joystick for navigation. The 3D map created by the laser scanner is transmitted to the haptic platform, which creates the virtual touch environment and feeds this information back to its user via the haptic device.

For more details, please refer to the official article.

Touch and hear what you draw with HIPP!

alyx — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:02:28 +0000

Images are used with permission from Kirsten Rassmus-Gröhn (Project leader of HIPP Project, Certec, Lund University)

Project HIPP (Haptics in Pedagogical Practice) by Lund University’s Certec, has developed a HIPP Drawing Program that enables users with visual impairments to draw digital images in an interactive tactile-audio environment. SenseGraphics H3DAPI comes into play by making it possible to use a haptic pen device to experience touch feedbacks as the user creates the images i.e. feeling the different depths of the lines drawn on the screen and receiving audio feedbacks as the user explores a map. Version 1.0 Beta of the HIPP Program is now available for free download, do check out HIPP main page for more details!

About SenseGraphics H3D API:

The development platform H3D offers the complete set of technologies needed to initiate high-performance hapto-visual 3D application development. For more information on how others are putting haptics and H3D into action, please visit SenseGraphics Hall of Fame.

For your eyes only…

johan — Fri, 28 May 2010 06:30:11 +0000

We have just started a thesis project to investigate the possibility to integrate Tobii eye tracking technology with SenseGraphics H3DAPI and SenseGraphics Display solutions. Tobii, a company in Sweden, has been very successful in bringing their eye tracking products to the market, not only for assistive and research use but also in outstanding eye-tracking solutions for market research and usability studies/analysis. In just a couple of years they’ve grown from a small start-up to a company employing well over 200 people, all over the world!

The Tobii eye tracking technology has some advantages to competitors solutions; fully automatic eye tracking, very high accuracy with the ability to track nearly all people with good tolerances on head motions.

The thesis work includes hardware integration of eye tracking for use in SenseGraphics “immersive workbench” solutions. As we are using real stereo 3D in our setups, there is a great challenge to overcome the problem of 3D glasses blocking lights. Tobii is using advanced image processing of a person’s face and eyes and reflections in the eyes of infrared reference lights to estimate eye position and precise “gaze target”. The thesis project will investigate some possible solutions and hopefully we’re able to present a working prototype later this year…!?

The combination of eye tracking and use of haptics in real 3D stereo interactive environments would allow for some very interesting research possibilities in for example neuroscience. Hopefully our H3DAPI users will “soon” gain access to users gaze and eye position data for further research application development in SenseGraphics Display solutions…

Medical staff employing video game technology…

johan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:56:10 +0000

Check out this video from an irish news channel that features som SenseGraphics H3DAPI based medical simulator…

http://www.tv3.ie/videos.php?video=17408&locID=

H3DAPI on the move to Japan

johan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:56:27 +0000

SenseGraphics technology will be presented by the Proviz project at the Swedish embassy in Tokyo, Japan, September 20. PhD Stina Svensson will show some of the work done in the Proviz project which includes 3D visualization and manipulation of Proteins…

UK Prime Minister a H3DAPI user?

johan — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:55:48 +0000

UK Prime Minister recently opened up the International Digital Laboratory at the University of Warwick. The Digital Laboratory is an impressive new facility that will host world topp class academics with interest in digital technologies working on digital manufacturing and digital healthcare. During the opening ceremony, UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown used a demonstrational ‘virtual scissors’ to cut a ribbon in cyberspace. The demonstrator was actually built using H3DAPI and a SensAble Phantom Desktop haptic device.