Ricksmuseum

For the Physical Computing course, Ralph Kok and I created a mouse with haptic feedback. This means that with this mouse you can feel the things you see on your screen. The mouse gives a kind of force-feedback (resistance) on certain parts of the screen.

First of all, things like this do exist allready. It’s not that we invented the first mouse with haptic feedback. What we did was building one ourselves by taking an old serial mouse and putting an electro magnet in it and controlling this magnet with a microcontroller which receives the color of the pixel your mouse points at.

Mouses with haptical feedback can be very usefull for disabled people who need extra accessability tools to use a computer. You could for example snap to buttons to help people clicking on them. You can do this programmatically by displacing the mouse cursor to create the same effect. This works very well as you can see on the website of Koert van Mensvoort.

The movie below shows a part of our process building a mouse with real haptical feedback.

More info

What You See Is What You Feel was a project for the Hardware class.
With this project, we aimed to realize haptic feedback through a conventional computer mouse.

We all know what it feels like when you move your finger over a bumpy surface, when the progress of your finger’s movement becomes harder, then easier, then harder again and so on. When you move up a bump, you are moving against gravity and friction, so your progress becomes slower, until you get to the other side and the resistance is gone. This simple concept of increasing and decreasing resistance is what we used to achieve our goal.

The hypothesis behind this project is that when you vary the amount of resistance at certain locations when moving your computer mouse, you get the sense that you are moving it over a bumpy surface.
Now, how can we vary this resistance? How can we stop someone’s movement? The answer is, of course: magnetism.

Using a wired coil, fixed inside a computer mouse and attached via a small circuit board to a Wiring I/O board, we were able to relate magnetic power to mouse cursor position and simulate a bumpy surface.
Processing retrieved color values from a bump map, based on mouse cursor positions. These values were passed to the Wiring I/O board and were used to generate electrical pulses at certain frequencies. A self made circuit board converted these pulse frequencies to voltages, effectively giving us the possibility to “dim” the magnetic power.

With this fairly simple setup, we were able to create the actual sensation of moving your mouse over a bumpy surface, a sensation we recommend anybody to experience!