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Ultrasound – inaudible sound waves normally associated with cancer treatments and monitoring the unborn – may change the way we interact with our mobile devices.
Couple that with a different kind of wave – light, in the form of lasers – and we’re edging towards a world of 3D, holographic displays hovering in the air that we can touch, feel and control.
UK start-up Ultrahaptics, for example, is working with car maker Jaguar Land Rover to create invisible air-based controls that drivers can feel and tweak. Instead of fumbling for the dashboard radio volume or temperature slider, and taking your eyes off the road, ultrasound waves would form the controls around your hand.
“You don’t have to actually make it all the way to a surface, the controls find you in the middle of the air and let you operate them,” said Tom Carter, co-founder and chief technology officer of Ultrahaptics.
Such technologies, proponents argue, are an advance on devices we can control via gesture – like Nintendo’s Wii or Leap Motion’s sensor device that allows users to control computers with hand gestures. That’s because they mimic the tactile feel of real objects by firing pulses of inaudible sound to a spot in mid-air.
They also move beyond the latest generation of tactile mobile interfaces, where companies such as Apple and Huawei are building more response into the cold glass of a mobile device screen.
Ultrasound promises to move interaction from the flat and physical to the three-dimensional and air-bound. And that’s just for starters.
By applying similar theories about waves to light, some companies hope to not only reproduce the feel of a mid-air interface, but to make it visible, too.
Japanese start-up Pixie Dust Technologies, for example, wants to match mid-air haptics with tiny lasers that create visible holograms of those controls. This would allow users to interact, say, with large sets of data in a 3D aerial interface.
“It would be like the movie Iron Man,” says Takayuki Hoshi, a co-founder, referencing a sequence in the film where the lead character played by Robert Downey Jr. projects holographic images and data in mid-air from his computer, which he is then able to manipulate by hand.
