Seeing is believing for some VR users, but to truly top off the virtual reality experience one needs to be able to touch imaginary worlds, which the Dexmo exosuit lets users do. Made by Dexta Robotics, this exoskeleton provides tactile feedback in response to what users are seeing and interacting with in virtual environments.

The system also enhances usability, its fingertip-level force working in both directions – users can feel feedback but the game or other environment can also respond more minutely and accurately to user inputs, completing the experience.

The trick behind the tech is to couple fast-acting sensors and a light-touch frame that provides flexibility but also translates inputs precisely. Bonus: the whole system is wireless. For now, the critical limitations are in the software, which is being worked on by the team prior to public market release.

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Like something straight out of Iron Man, this new heads-up display (HUD) from the United States Navy turns diving helmets into dynamic screens.

The Divers Augmented Reality Display, or DAVD for short, is still in a prototyping phase but is designed to provide real-time data for underwater missions, supplemented with sonar and photography as well as briefs and texts to keep divers current while exploring the depths.

A pair of transparent displays together form a stereoscopic augmented heads-up display, simulating depth for divers in low-visibility scenarios.

Live maps can be overlaid on murky scenes, allowing the diver to see regardless of conditions on the ground (or in the water, as it were).

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The future generally looks so bright, shiny and utterly perfect when envisioned by futurists, or terrible, dark and depressing through the eyes of dystopians. This film is something else entirely, neither beyond nor between – a humorously realistic look at how our current tech could turn dismally ordinary in the years to come.

London designer Keiichi Matsuda created this short film about augmented reality, layering touch interfaces, projections and holographic figures on ordinary and everyday scenes of normal life. Much like regular reality, where we deal with computer glitches and unwanted ads, this extrapolates those same familiar problems.

Shop signs and traffic lights are overlaid on ordinary buildings and walls, turning a bland world technicolor, but not in a way that is entirely appealing. At times and places where this layering could become helpful rather than intrusive, it veers toward the latter, much like pop-up and auto-play-audio ads on the internet.

“Our physical and virtual realities are becoming increasingly intertwined,” said Matsuda. “Technologies such as VR, augmented reality, wearables, and the internet of things are pointing to a world where technology will envelop every aspect of our lives. It will be the glue between every interaction and experience, offering amazing possibilities, while also controlling the way we understand the world,” he said. “Hyper-Reality attempts to explore this exciting but dangerous trajectory.”

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As much a psychological experiment as crowd-sourced art project, this series of 3D-modeled bicycles is based on sketches made from the memories of participants trying to recall how bikes are put together, then turned into fully-rendered prototypes.

Gianluca Gimini, a designer in Bologna, Italy, asked friends, family and strangers how they remembered a bicycle working, but without being able to look at an actual bike.

He collected hundreds of the resulting drawings, then started turning them into photo-realistic renders which look laughable but reflect a quirk of psychology that allows many of us to forget just how things go together.

In his ‘Celocipedia,’ he found “there is an incredible diversity of new typologies emerging from these crowd-sourced and technically error-driven drawings. A single designer could not invent so many new bike designs in 100 lifetimes and this is why I look at this collection in such awe.”

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Virtual reality’s promise of an immersive environment is impressive, but generally incomplete without something like this newly-developed system to let users actually feel the effects of interacting in digitally-created cyberspaces through actual muscle stimulation, a big step beyond low-tech vibrations.

Simulating physical impact, as demonstrated above, combines tactile and muscle stimulation via a device called Impacto. The accessory is worn on arms, legs, hands or feet and tied into the virtual reality experience with specialized software, allowing people to touch and feel objects. Well on its way to being fully wireless (for now it is at least not cord-connected to an external device), it lets users move around in real (and virtual) space without feeling uncumbered or worrying about tripping over cords.

Examples include: feeling the impacts of soccer balls bounced on legs or of punches blocked in a boxing game. “Of note, Impacto isn’t a simple vibrate motor shoved into a plastic box. The device combines a haptic vibration engine with electrical muscle stimulation to actually create a sensation of pushing or pulling, therefore more closely mimicking the feeling of contact from actual physical objects.”

“The key idea that allows the small and light impacto device to simulate a strong hit is that it decomposes the stimulus: it renders the tactile aspect of being hit by tapping the skin using a solenoid; it adds impact to the hit by thrusting the user’s arm backwards using electrical muscle stimulation,” the team, led by Pedro Lopes, said in an abstract covering its research paper on Impacto.

The next step: creating additional add-ons for torsos and other areas of bodies, all toward the eventual goal of a full-body suit for maximum effect. Applications go beyond entertainment and gaming as well – eventually systems like this could allow for remote scientific or medical procedures with haptic feedback for delicate situations.

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