Publications by Juan José Zarate

TacTiles: Dual-Mode Low-Power Electromagnetic Actuators for Rendering Continuous Contact and Spatial Haptic Patterns in VR

Herbert Shea, Juan José Zarate, Ronan Julien Hinchet

We introduce TacTiles, light (1.8g), low-power (130 mV), and small form -factor (1cm(3)) electromagnetic actuators that can form a flexible haptic array to provide localized tactile feedback. Our novel hardware design uses a custom 8 -layer PCB, dampening ...

IEEE2019

Enhancing general spatial skills of young visually impaired people with a programmable distance discrimination training: a case control study

Herbert Shea, Juan José Zarate

Background The estimation of relative distance is a perceptual task used extensively in everyday life. This important skill suffers from biases that may be more pronounced when estimation is based on haptics. This is especially true for the blind and visua ...

BioMed Central2019

Shape memory polymer resonators as highly sensitive uncooled infrared detectors

Herbert Shea, Luis Guillermo Villanueva Torrijo, Tom Larsen, Juan José Zarate, Ulas Adiyan

Uncooled infrared detectors have enabled the rapid growth of thermal imaging applications. These detectors are predominantly bolometers, reading out a pixel’s temperature change due to infrared radiation as a resistance change. Another uncooled sensing met ...

Nature Research2019

An electromagnetic actuator

Herbert Shea, Juan José Zarate

The present invention concerns an electromagnetic actuator (2) for a haptic display (1). The actuator (2) comprises: a) a first, movable permanent magnetic element (5), the first magnetic element (5) comprising a first latching layer facing side, a second ...

2018

Device having a plurality of latching micro-actuators and method of operating the same

Herbert Shea, Samuel Rosset, Nadine Besse, Juan José Zarate

An actuator device including a plurality of transducer actuators, and a common pneumatic actuation mechanism for shaping the plurality of transducer actuators, wherein each actuator of the plurality of transducer actuators includes a shape memory polymer m ...

2018

Understanding Graphics on a Scalable Latching Assistive Haptic Display Using a Shape Memory Polymer Membrane

Herbert Shea, Nadine Besse, Samuel Rosset, Juan José Zarate

2017

Flexible Active Skin: Large Reconfigurable Arrays of Individually Addressed Shape Memory Polymer Actuators

Herbert Shea, Samuel Rosset, Nadine Besse, Juan José Zarate

A high-resolution flexible active skin with a matrix of 32x24 individually addressable tactile pixels on a 4 mm pitch is reported, based on shape memory polymer (SMP) actuators. The intrinsic multistable nature of SMPs, and their more than hundred-fold var ...

Wiley2017

Using pot-magnets to enable stable and scalable electromagnetic tactile displays

Herbert Shea, Juan José Zarate

We present the design, fabrication, characterization and psychophysical testing of a scalable haptic display based on electromagnetic (EM) actuators. The display consists of a 4x4 array of taxels, each of which can be in a raised or a lowered position, thu ...

2016

Optimization of the force and power consumption of a microfabricated magnetic actuator

Herbert Shea, Juan José Zarate

The force (F) and the power consumption (P ) of a magnetic actuator are modeled, measured and optimized in the context of developing micro-actuators for large arrays, such as in portable tactile displays for the visually impaired. We present a novel analyt ...

Elsevier2015