Overview and Exploitation of Haptic Tele-Weight Device in Virtual Shopping Stores

In view of the problem of e-commerce scams and the absence of haptic interaction, this research aims to introduce and create a tele-weight device for e-commerce shopping in smart cities. The objective is to use the proposed prototype to provide a brief overview of the possible technological advancements. When the tele-weight device is affixed over the head-mounted display, it allows the user to feel the item’s weight while shopping in the virtual store. Addressing the problem of having no physical interaction between the user (player) and a series game scene in virtual reality (VR) headsets, this research approach focuses on creating a prototype device that has two parts, a sending part and a receiving part. The sending part measures the weight of the object and transmits it over the cellular network to the receiver side. The virtual store user at the receiving side can thus realize the weight of the ordered object. The findings from this work include a visual display of the item’s weight to the virtual store e-commerce user. By introducing sustainability, this haptic technology-assisted technique can help the customer realize the weight of an object and thus have a better immersive experience. In the device, the load cell measures the weight of the object and amplifies it using the HX711 amplifier. However, some delay in the demonstration of the weight was observed during experimentation, and this indirectly altered the performance of the system. One set of the device is sited at the virtual store user premises while the sending end of the device is positioned at the warehouse. The sending end hardware includes an Arduino Uno device, an HX711 amplifier chip to amplify the weight from the load cell, and a cellular module (Sim900A chip-based) to transmit the weight in the form of an encoded message. The receiving end hardware includes a cellular module and an actuator involving a motor gear arrangement to demonstrate the weight of the object. Combining the fields of e-commerce, embedded systems, VR, and haptic sensing, this research can help create a more secure marketplace to attain a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Piezochromism of Cyanostilbene Derivatives: A Small Structural Alteration Makes a Big Photophysical Difference

Piezoresponsive fluorescent materials are highly promising for applications in deformation, flaw detection and haptic sensing. Some donor-acceptor luminophors exhibit a marked redshift and high sensitivity under high pressure. However, the...

Active Thermal Sensor for Improved Distributed Temperature Sensing in Haptic Arrays

The efficacy of integrating temperature sensors into compliant pressure sensing technologies, such as haptic sensing arrays, is limited by thermal losses into the substrate. A solution is proposed here whereby an active heat sink is incorporated into the sensor to mitigate these losses, while still permitting the use of common VLSI manufacturing methods and materials to be used in sensor fabrication. This active sink is capable of responding to unknown fluctuations in external temperature, that is, the temperature that is to be measured, and directly compensates in real time for the thermal power loss into the substrate by supplying an equivalent amount of power back into the thermal sensor. In this paper, the thermoelectric effects of the active heat sink/thermal sensor system are described and used to reduce the complexity of the system to a simple one-dimensional numerical model. This model is incorporated into a feedback system used to control the active heat sink and monitor the sensor output. A fabrication strategy is also described to show how such a technology can be incorporated into a common bonded silicon-on-insulator- (BSOI-) based capacitive pressure sensor array such as that used in some haptic sensing systems.