Over the past few months I have been working with a company – NullSpace VR.

Wearing the Mark 2 Suit! (No gloves)

What is NullSpace VR?

They’re working hard on a Haptic Feedback suit!

• Region based feeling – your avatar gets hit in the shoulder, you feel a vibrating pulse.
• Gloves – Reach out and touch a piece of the digital world, feeling haptic clicks, buzzes and snaps as you interact

MY Contributions

Since last summer I’ve been creating demos, working on their API and helping pull various technology.

• Demos – Show-off their awesome technology
• Unity API – Creating tools for future developers to use

Demos

Dodgeblock

In Dodgeblock the player suits up to dodge projectiles and collect others.

The demo currently uses the Kinect as our tracking system is finished up.

Sculpt

Sculpt is an interaction demo where you carve a large chunk of blocks, feeling haptic effects along the way.

Use your hands to paint or remove blocks.

This version of the demo was built for Leap Motion & the Feedback Gloves.

Unity API

To add NullSpace’s haptics to your game there are three main ways to do it.

• Through Code – Create a haptic at this spot for X duration with Y type of effect (pulse, click, hum, etc)
• With Physics – Have collision code with environment objects create and remove haptic effects. (Ex. Fire creates a rapid pulse, a table creates a simple click)
• With the haptics editor – Imagine an animation or cut-scene for physical haptic effects. (created by yours truly)

The Journey

Working with NullSpace has been an interesting challenge. It’s been a mix of my technical knowledge and expertise blended with hardware and business which are outside of my usual area of discipline.

There is a long list of features to support that have come together

• Infinite duration haptics
• Start & Stop on code command
• Start & Stop on physics events
• Handling multiple haptics simultaneously
• Avoiding connection loss
• Auto-connecting the hardware to the game code.

I look forward to continuing my work.