Haptics

A handheld ESP32-C6 device that synthesizes the feeling of a ball rolling and sliding inside a tube you cannot see, reproducing Yao and Hayward’s 2006 virtual rolling stone. Two haptic output paths: an I2S amplifier driving a TITAN Haptics actuator, and an H-bridge driving a motor directly. Ongoing personal project.

From the prototype to PCBs manufactured by JLCPCB: several revisions, a smaller double-sided assembly, and successful first tests. The virtual rolling stone now has dedicated electronics.

A weekend project that refuses to end: a handheld device that lets you feel a virtual ball rolling and sliding inside a tube you cannot see, based on Yao and Hayward’s 2006 length-perception experiment. Part 1 covers the illusion, the physics, the ESP32-C6 firmware, and the first build that renders the ball as audio through an I2S amplifier and a TITAN Haptics actuator.

The second build of my virtual rolling-stone device drops the audio amplifier entirely and drives a vibration motor straight from an H-bridge on a CodeCell ESP32-C6 Drive board. Same physics, same illusion, a completely different output stage: 1 kHz instead of 22 kHz, unipolar PWM instead of bipolar audio, and a few embedded gotchas along the way.

The vibrotactile world is drowning in fragmentation. Every console, every device, its own ecosystem. Meanwhile, force feedback has had a de facto standard for decades without anyone writing a spec. Here’s why.

Touch is one of our earliest and most intimate senses, yet we know remarkably little about its quirks. Optical illusions have entire museums. Haptic illusions have a GitHub repo and a 3D printer.

Model-Mediated Teleoperation (MMT) between a haptic device and a remote or virtual environment uses a local model of the environment to …

The ability to understand simple vocabulary, conveyed by haptics, has demonstrated encouraging results, even with limited training. …