Haptic dev kit lets you feel the vibe

A haptic technology that uses ultrasound and provides users with a touch sensation to virtually “feel” switches, buttons and other controls in mid-air has been developed by haptic specialists, Ultrahaptics.

This development kit can be used for the evaluation and testing of prototype mid-air haptics in touchless gesture control systems.

Haptic or kinesthetic communication recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations or motions to the user.

This stimulation helps to create virtual objects in a computer simulation and the ability to control such objects. Haptic devices may incorporate tactile sensors that measure forces exerted by the user on the interface.

The advantage of touchless controls is they are hygienic in many medical, industrial and domestic applications while their use for automotive infotainment and dashboard functions improves driver safety by not distracting attention from the road.

The UHDK5 TOUCH Development Kit provides a hardware and software package with an architecture that can be embedded in product designs, from prototypes through to volume production.

The company claims its self-contained plug-and-play UHDK5 kit works out of the box and provides demonstrations that require no technical knowledge from the user. For developers the Arm core and FPGA embeddable architecture eases integration and provides a production ready design that should help to reduce BOM cost. Similarly the provision of APIs code using C++ programming language allows software engineers to adapt their application interfaces with customised sensations.