Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, engineers, and thinkers to expand their imagination. While current immersion systems primarily rely on visual and audio inputs, the next level of enhanced immersion necessitates bringing physical interaction into play, blurring the lines between human body sensations and virtual environments entities, events, and features.Physical interaction fidelity and the quality of immersive experience is paramount to bring the technology to a level that can truly elevate the current capabilities. Creating organic sensations that can feel realistic to the users are at the center of physical interaction to leverage the virtual immersion. Similarly, each human, each immersive space and each virtual space has different physical characteristics and response to physical stimulus, which is the core of a need for adaptive design and customizable physical solutions. Developing systems that can adjust to specific requirements and that can evolve depending on the application or user while staying within a specific framework is necessary to reach a high level of physical immersive experience.To address this broad challenge, I developed a generic tool able to fulfill the requirements in a large and non-specifically defined way is developed in the form of a modular robotic surface. The concept is to embed the key capabilities inside an actuated and sensorized surface to create physical interaction on the human body as well as on the human artificial environment which are both made of a set of surfaces at different scales and resolutions. The underlying technical challenge I have been addressing is to create force feedback on a human body with a distributed surface to bring the largest range of physical sensations possible, on the entirety of the human body. Those force feedbacks are specifically targeted to result from a distributed stiffness mapping through profile on a surface in contact with the users to create the organic and natural interaction desired to enhance the immersion. Finally, interacting with the whole human body brought the need for me to develop a human-scale solution for users to interact with the ground and potential human-scale features in an intuitive way to reach a full interactive, scale, size, and resolution ranges for interaction with virtual worlds and entities.Through these advancements, I brought new possibilities with an interactive surface to unlock new immersive experiences, expanding human potential and imagination in virtual environments. By seamlessly integrating physical interaction and virtual worlds, these systems pave the way for groundbreaking applications towards interfacing humans and computers, controlling machines, for humans to communicate among themselves, and even to redefine the way we use space for living.