ModGrasp
A Wave Simulator and Active Heave Compensation Framework
JOpenShowVar, a communication interface to Kuka robots

Blog

WEART TouchDIVER: connecting digital and physical worlds.

We have a brand new haptic device at the Top Research Centre Mechatronics (TRCM), University of Agder (UiA), Norway.

The WEART TouchDIVER device has just arrived.

We would like to especially thank Guido Gioioso and Francesco Abbo for the support. We would also like to thank Domenico Prattichizzo for the inspiring collaboration.

WEART connects digital and physical worlds by adding the one sense that is missing: TOUCH. Live a truly immersive VR experience and touch digital objects as you would in real life.

Our PhD Fellow, Saishashank Balaji, will use the TouchDIVER to help children with autism to improve sensory integration and situational awareness.

Our PhD Fellow, Even Falkenberg Langås, will use the TouchDIVER for interacting with digitaltwins at Tvillingfabrikken AS.

Our PhD Fellow, Hareesh Chitikena, will use the TouchDIVER for teleoperation of snake robots.

We are also considering using the TouchDIVER for improving situational awareness for emergency management at the Centre for Integrated Emergency Mangement (CIEM).

We look forward to collaborate with weart to further investigate the use of the TouchDiver device in human-robot collaboration (HRC) to help people with autism, teleoperation of our snake robot, human-robot interaction (HRI) for digital-twins, and many other robotics applications.

The Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM) is granted status as priority research centre (PRIFORSK)

Congratulations to all the team at CIEM - Centre for Integrated Emergency Management which is now a priority research centre at University of Agder (UiA). It's a pleasure to be a part of this great research environment. Daniel Romero and I lead the cluster Technologies for Augmenting Response Capabilities in Emergency Management Operations at CIEM.

A Multi-Modal Auditory-Visual-Tactile e-Learning Framework

Glad to see that the research work of my team is very much in line with Meta‘s push on haptics. Haptics is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Our team recently presented the following work: Filippo Sanfilippo, Tomas Blažauskas, Gionata Salvietti, Isabel Ramos, Silviu Vert, Jaziar Radianti, and Tim A. Majchrzak. Integrating VR/AR with Haptics into STEM Education. In Proceeding of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies and Applications (INTAP 2021), Grimstad, Norway. 2021.

Our team also developed a novel haptic-enabled framework for hands-on e-Learning. The framework enables a fully-immersive tactile, auditory, and visual experience. This is achieved by combining virtual reality (VR) tools, with a novel wearable haptic device, which is designed by augmenting a low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) controller with vibrotactile actuators.

This work was published: Filippo Sanfilippo, Tomas Blazauskas, Martynas Girdžiūna, Airidas Janonis, Eligijus Kiudys and Gionata Salvietti. A Multi-Modal Auditory-Visual-Tactile e-Learning Framework. In Proceeding of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies and Applications (INTAP 2021), Grimstad, Norway. 2021.

This work was awarded the Best Conference Paper at INTAP 2021.

This work is part of our European project titled Integrating virtual and AUGMENTED reality with WEARable technology into engineering EDUcation (AugmentedWearEdu), funded through the Call 2020 Round 1 KA2 - Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices, Erasmus+. Partners: Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania; University of Siena (UNISI), Italy; Universida de do Minho (UMinho), Portugal; University Politehnica Timișoara (UPT), Romania. https://augmentedwearedu.uia.no/

Filippo Sanfilippo