Home Page of the Moose

A General-purpose Haptic Display Device

Moose with Hand

The figure above shows the hardware components of our present planar haptic interface which we affectionately call `The Moose'. The puck or manipulandum in the center is coupled to two linear voice coil motors through two perpendicularly oriented flexures. The double flexure conveniently decouples the 2-axis motion of the puck into two single-axis motions at the linear motors.

The Moose was designed at CCRMA by Brent Gillespie and Sile O'Modhrain. It has attracted the interest of theArchimedes Project at CSLI, Stanford, and together we have begun to investigate the possibility of using Haptic technology to display elements of Graphical User Interfaces such as window edges, buttons, etc. to Blind computer users. Our prototype display for MS Windows has generated much interest and it is hoped that this work will continue alongside our exploration into the use of haptics as a component of a digital music editing system.