Locomotion Interfaces and Rendering

Robotics and Virtual Reality Applications in Mobility Rehabilitation

“…The Mobility Simulator also incorporates an electro-pneumatic control interface, an un-weighting frame (Biodex Co.), a graphical workstation and a large screen custom display. The design of the simulator fits in the "foot platforms" category defined by Hollerbach (Hollerbach, 1999). The user stands with each foot secured with straps to the top of a platform, while the VR simulation (Boian et al, 2004b) is displayed on the large screen facing the user.…”

“…Depending on the degrees of freedom of the platforms, these systems may be able to simulate complex surfaces, by controlling the position and orientation of the surface at each foot. Examples of foot platforms are the Sarcos Biport (Hollerbach, 1999) that uses 2DOF platforms and the GaitMaster (Iwata et al, 2001) that uses 3DOF platforms. Just like the treadmills above, the foot platform system presented in this section feature flexibility for rendering more complex surfaces, but their design was not meant for clinical usage.…”

“…The treadmill design solves this problem with a straight forward approach, but is limited to simulating an infinite straight smooth path. To rendered surfaces richer in features, researchers devised several designs, which Hollerbach (Hollerbach, 1999) classifies into three categories: walk-in-place devices, treadmills, and foot platforms.…”

Wind display device for locomotion interface in a virtual environment

“…FLUENT simulations for various wall designs show that the stability of core flow is not affected by the shape of the nozzle formed by return-plenum walls as long as the returnplenum acts as a nozzle, Figure 14. Considering the ease of manufacturing, we use the straight wall design in Figure 14 (4). …”

“…The TPAWT aims to improve the sense of immersion [1] created by the existing TreadPort Virtual Environment [2], Figure 1, by adding wind, olfactory, and radiant heat display. The existing TreadPort provides a rich CAVE-like visual interface [3] and accurate locomotion forces as a user walks through a virtual environment [2,4,5]. The TPAWT modifies this system by turning it into a controllable wind tunnel (the first of its kind) in order to regulate wind velocity (speed and orientation) acting on the user.…”