Haptics (week 27)

My initial sketch of the glove sensors and positions (2018)

One of the key senses involved in draping a toile is touch. being able to feel and tweak the texture of a fabric, put it into place with accuracy and emotional creativity are essential to the success of a draper.

At the moment common devices for interacting with VR are fairly large and clunky hand held devices with buttons and triggers. These can be very intuitive to use, or very not, depending on the manufacturer.

I am experimenting with creating a design prototype for a lightweight glove that would enable both finger tip precision and control - enabling sensors to read exactly where in space the hand was for accurate recreation in VR, but also with return sensors of the fingertips that would allow the exact feeling of fingers on cloth, pins etc to be felt by the wearer.

The prototype design will be 3D printed directly onto Power-mesh fabric with PLA  using autodesk sketchup as the design tool

The print uses biodegradable gold plastic for the back-of-hand sensors and a clear plastic for the finger tip sensors. It was put into CAD and printed by B.Blincoe from my original design. he discovered that the powermesh which has a slight stretch was too fine to correctly absorb the hot plastic so a looser weave mesh has been used. This does not have a stretch, but as the glove is simply a visual aid prototype I do not think that is an issue.