Fron: Dale Mahalko
To: sarcosinfo@sarcos.com
Date: Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:21 PM
Subject: Exosuit repurposed as a VR/3D haptic interface
Dear sir or madam,
After reading about your firm's exoskeleton projects for the US military, I would like to mention an alternative use for the exosuit technology that your engineers may not have considered.
While an exoskeleton may be able to magnify the strength of a soldier by several times over, those same abilities would allow the suit to perform as a fully immersive 3D virtual reality haptics interface, by sensing the occupant's position and actively moving against the occupant to simulate contact with virtual objects and surfaces within a simulated 3D environment.
One of the biggest problems with fully immersive environments is the problem of physically walking across the simulated space. There is no simple way to allow a person to walk in any direction within a virtual environment, short of placing them on top of a large sphere and rotating the sphere in the opposite direction of the user's travel. This also does not allow for VR simulation of stairways, inclines, or rough terrain.
Your exosuit would solve this problem very easily by mounting the back of the suit to a G-force/rotation gantry that suspends the suit and wearer a few feet above the ground. The wearer could then walk through a simulated 3D space, and the exosuit could provide sensory feedback such as of rough ground, or stepping up onto stairs.
Suspending the suit and wearer in midair allows for realistic simulated collisions and falling. They could be pushed by a simulated object and "fall over" by having the suit rotate into a prone position, followed by sudden upward motion of the gantry to simulate hitting the ground.
The US military might have an interest in this since it would allow for training simulations of a multitude of vehicles and environments, whereby training can be performed in a fully virtual environment and soldiers can literally climb up the ladder of a virtual vehicle and feel the ladder lugs under their feet, open its virtual cab door and feel the inertia of the door in their hands, and ride along in a sitting position in a virtual vehicle passenger seat as it bounces over rough terrain, all within the exosuit suspended in midair.
I am aware that the major barrier to using the exosuit on the battlefield is the problem of a sufficiently capable and small portable power supply. As a haptic interface, this problem can be ignored since it would always be tethered as a haptic device.
Generally all this is immediately applicable to the exosuit your firm has developed, with no major changes other than the ability for the suit to provide posiitonal inputs to a VR avatar in a 3D world, and for the simulated evironment to provide accurate force feedback to the avatar and consquently to the suit wearer.
The main challenge would be to develop the G-force-feedback support gantry and a gimbal system permitting the suit and wearer to move and rotate 360 degrees in any direction suspended in midair.
For the fully immersive experience to work, a head-tracking high-resolution stereo video display helmet or goggles, with position-aware stereo headphones would be needed for the haptic suit wearer.
I do not have the technological skill, programming background, or financial resources to carry any of this out on my own. But I would like to see such a technology developed. Since you are the developers of the exoskeleton, it seems you would be the only ones capable of developing this concept to completion.
I have posted about this concept previously on Internet forums and discussion boards, so it is out there waiting for someone to take this virtual ball and run with it across a virtual field.
https://lists.secondlife.com/
Thank you for your time.
- Dale Mahalko
