Augmented reality, once the realm of sci-fi books and imaginative gamers, is now part of our everyday lives. The Microsoft Kinect has become a staple in the living rooms of homes around the world, but it’s missing one thing: the sensation of touch.

Research conducted by University of Illinois PhD candidate Rajinder Sodhi and Disney Research’s Ivan Poupyrev resulted in a fascinating new technology. It’s called the Aireal, and when it’s activated it sends out tiny puffs of air that let you feel textures and objects in mid-air.

According to the inventors, the sensation is nothing like air simply blowing on your skin. The apparatus consists of five subwoofers that track your body movements. The machine pushes air out rapidly through a hole and can adjust the puffs of air to mimic textures such as sand, water, or stone.

There are no special gadgets to wear, no complex wired systems to install. The Aireal can be used to simulate sensations like a flock of birds flying around the room or a butterfly landing on your hand.

There is still a lot of refinement and research to be done on the Aireal, but the technology is all available today. It’s inexpensive and can bring a whole new level of sensations to your entertainment experience.

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The tactile relationships we share with the objects we use every day can have a big impact on the way we use them. Our typical keyboards, for instance, come with bumps on the F and J keys to show where our index fingers should rest while in “home position.” Other than those little bumps, however, there aren’t many tactile clues to where our fingers should be resting or pressing.

The Engrain Tactile keyboard from designer Michael Roopenian adds a rich tactile experience to our typing by giving the keyboard a wood grain texture and unique feel for each and every key. The keys are all covered with textured sandblasted wood, each making up a small part of the larger overall pattern.

A lot of research went into the design of the Engrain, including studying which keys are used the most and how users move their fingers across the keys. The result is a keyboard that is both beautiful and easy to use, giving our fingers something to tell our brains that they’re in the right place without requiring our eyes to look down every sentence or two.

The post Tactile Tapping: Uniquely Textured Woodgrain Keyboard first appeared on Gajitz.

One of the major advantages we humans have traditionally had over robots is our fairly refined sense of touch. Scratch that off of the list, though, because a team of researchers at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering have created a robot that can outperform humans in the task of identifying materials. The bot is equipped with a tactile sensor that mimics the human fingertip. A bone-like core is covered with a sensor called BioTac over a liquid filling. The “fingertip” also has fingerprints which enhance its sensitivity to textures.

The bot is programmed to perform exploratory movements in order to identify a wide variety of materials. Humans perform these types of movements whenever we are trying to figure out what an object is. The difference is that the robot does it much, much better than us. Of the 117 materials that it was trained to recognize, the bot identified the correct one 95% of the time. It outperformed humans who were stumped by materials with similar textures. The super-accurate, sort-of-creepy robot could be an important step toward improving prosthesis technology, ushering in a new generation of prosthetic limbs with the ability to feel.

The post Robot Fingertip IDs Textures More Accurately Than Humans first appeared on Gajitz.