Applying muscle-stimulating electrodes to carefully selected points on the necks of volunteers can make the wearer look up or down, or side to side 鈥� which could be useful for steering attention in a 3D virtual reality (VR) training or gaming environment, and potentially in augmented reality (AR) applications in the real world, too.
It might sound like taking a sinister level of control of somebody鈥檚 body, but the underlying idea, says at the University of Chicago, is to create a way of steering a user鈥檚 attention to something they really need to see.
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Currently, the only technological systems capable of steering the head are the robotic exoskeletons used by medics for neck rehabilitation. 鈥淏ut they are very large and connect to your face directly, pushing against the four sides of your head. This is not something that will work for AR and VR, where users want a lightweight actuator without cables,鈥� says Tanaka.
So, he spent months doing experiments designed to find the points around the neck where electrical muscle stimulation could safely steer the head, placing electrodes atop each of the nine muscles that aren鈥檛 too deep to respond to surface stimulation. While forcing a user to tilt their head proved possible, it also induced unwanted shoulder movements, so they abandoned plans to incorporate tilting. But Tanaka found that moving the head up and down, and side to side, was eminently feasible.
鈥淗e鈥檚 the first to robustly and accurately actuate the head muscles so well that we can make someone look at a point in space,鈥� says his colleague and supervisor , also at University of Chicago.
The team will present the work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 4 May, with a demonstration of how the technology might be used in an augmented-reality fire safety training scenario.
In this, a person unfamiliar with a building in which fire breaks out has their head steered so they can see where a fire extinguisher is stored. Tanaka accepts that RFID tags or QR codes on extinguishers could tell your phone where they are 鈥� but says that in emergencies, engaging with a smartphone might not be an option.
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