Haptics: Phase I Photo Editing by Matt

What we would consider Phase I is now complete on our haptics photo editing research project! That is, creating software/hardware that is essentially a “working model”- I will be showing a demo of haptic devices editing the brightness of a photo below. Phase II will be refinement of the system, and Phase III the case study looking at how viable or useful the system is. If you landed here prematurely, make sure to recap on our first blog post for this project.

First things first, lets take a look at the system in action. This video shows the basic elements of the system, and will give you an idea of the end product. There is much “smoothing” to work on, along with different user modes like saturation, and blurring, which will eventually be incorporated.

Pretty neat right? Well if you don’t think so, your probably an English major. The next video will recap what we just saw, using hand motion and haptic feedback to intelligently edit an image. This video is centered on the computer monitor, so you can more clearly see the actual image being manipulated.

The next video explains a bit about the processing going on, from the terminal of the microprocessor (IDE is Dynamic C by Rabbit), to the circuit, and back to the terminal of Matlab.

By now, you get a great idea of where this project is headed. With some fine tuning of the software, on both the microprocessor and the Matlab side, it should be a great device to do some real human-based research. The last video outlines some of the electrical components, and the overall flow of the circuitry; essentially explaining what that mess of wire is actually doing for the system.

In this post, the videos spoke for themselves. This project will continue to progress and as always there will be continual updates. If you haven’t already, check out the complete progress in our Haptics Category.