full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Katherine Kuchenbecker: The technology of touch


Unscramble the Blue Letters


I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography. And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can reemmebr all the betuauifl and interesting things that I've seen. But what I can't do is record and share how these objects feel to touch. And that's kind of surprising, because your sense of tcouh is really important. It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, anything you do in the wolrd. So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting. It has two main coenpmtons. The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin. And the second is khttniseiec sensations. This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the froces you encounter. And you're really good at incorporating both of these types of sensations together to utanesdnrd the physical interactions you have with the world and understand as you touch a surface: is it a rock, is it a cat, is it a bunny, what is it? And so, as an egeiennr, I'm really fascinated and I have a lot of respect for how good people are with their hands. And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the haumn capability with the sense of touch. Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines by letting you take agavdnate of your hands? And indeed, I think we can, and that's at the core of a field called haptics, and this is the area that I work in. It's all about interactive touch technology. And the way it works is, as you move your body through the world, if, as an engineer, I can make a system that can measure that motion, and then present to you sensations over time that kind of make snsee, that match up with what you might feel in the real world, I can fool you into thinking you're touching something even though there's nothing there. So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn. The first one is all about that same problem that I was shoniwg you: how can we cuartpe how oetjcbs feel and recreate those experiences? So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside. It has a force sensor, so we can tell how hard you're pushing; it has motion tracking, so we can tell exactly where you've meovd it; and it has a vibration seonsr, an accelerometer, inside, that detects the shaking back and forth of the tool that lets you know that's a pciee of canvas and not a piece of silk or something else. Then we take the data we record from these interactions. Here's ten seconds of data. You can see how the vibrations get larger and smaller, depending on how you move. And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the sytuls and go and touch the screen, that voice-coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the iulolisn that you're touching the real sfucrae, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real cvaans. We can create very compelling illusions. We can do this for all kinds of surfaces and it's really a lot of fun. We call it htapgrahpoy — haptic ppgrhothoay. And I think it has ptienaotl bfetines in all srtos of areas like online sohpipng, maybe interactive musuem exhibits, where you're not sspupeod to touch the precious atirtfcas, but you always want to. The second example I want to tell you about comes from a collaboration I have with Dr. Margrit maiggo at the Penn Dental School. Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities. Of course they look at X-rays, but a large part of this clinical judgment comes from what they feel when they touch your teeth with a dental explorer. You've all had this happen, they go across. What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the eaneml is strating to decay. These tyeps of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet. And you want them to learn this before they start practicing on real human patients. So what we do is add an accelerometer on to the dneatl explorer, and then we record what Dr. Maggio feels as she touches different extracted teeth. And we can play it back for you as a video with a touch track — not just a sound track, but also a touch track, that you can feel by hdlinog that repeating tool. You feel the same things the dentist felt when they did the rinrodecg, and practice mnakig judgments. So here's a sample one. Here's a tooth that looks kind of suspicious, right? It has all those brown stains. You might be tnihnkig, "We should definitely put a fliinlg in this tooth." But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this totoh are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling. And these are exactly the kind of jtguedmns doctors make every day and I think this technology we've invented has a lot of potential for many different things in medical training, because it's really silpme and it does a great job at recreating what people feel through tools. I think it could also help make games more interactive and fun and more riatislec in the sensations that you feel. The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement. So if any of you have ever learned sports, how do you get good at something like surfing? You practice. You practice some more and more, right? Making small corrections, maybe getting some ipnut from a ccaoh, learning how to improve your miotnos. I think we could use cpoutmres to help make that process more efficient and more fun. And so here, for example, if I have six different arm movements that I want you to learn, you come into my lab at Penn and try out our system. We use a Kinect to msueare your motions, we show graphics on the screen, and then we also give you touch cues, haptic feedback on your arm, derevlied by these haptic arm bands which have motors inside, and guide you as you move. So, if we put it together, as you're trying to track this motion, if you deviate — say, maybe, your arm is a little too high — we turn on the motors right there on the skin to let you know you should move down, almost like a coach gently guiding you and helping you master these mmetnoevs more quickly and make more precise corrections. We dloveeped this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports traniing as well. So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years. I've shown you three eaelxmps. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great sundttes who work with me in my lab at Penn and my collaborators. They're a great group. I also want to thank you for your kind attention. (Applause)

Open Cloze


I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography. And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can ________ all the _________ and interesting things that I've seen. But what I can't do is record and share how these objects feel to touch. And that's kind of surprising, because your sense of _____ is really important. It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, anything you do in the _____. So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting. It has two main __________. The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin. And the second is ___________ sensations. This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the ______ you encounter. And you're really good at incorporating both of these types of sensations together to __________ the physical interactions you have with the world and understand as you touch a surface: is it a rock, is it a cat, is it a bunny, what is it? And so, as an ________, I'm really fascinated and I have a lot of respect for how good people are with their hands. And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the _____ capability with the sense of touch. Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines by letting you take _________ of your hands? And indeed, I think we can, and that's at the core of a field called haptics, and this is the area that I work in. It's all about interactive touch technology. And the way it works is, as you move your body through the world, if, as an engineer, I can make a system that can measure that motion, and then present to you sensations over time that kind of make _____, that match up with what you might feel in the real world, I can fool you into thinking you're touching something even though there's nothing there. So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn. The first one is all about that same problem that I was _______ you: how can we _______ how _______ feel and recreate those experiences? So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside. It has a force sensor, so we can tell how hard you're pushing; it has motion tracking, so we can tell exactly where you've _____ it; and it has a vibration ______, an accelerometer, inside, that detects the shaking back and forth of the tool that lets you know that's a _____ of canvas and not a piece of silk or something else. Then we take the data we record from these interactions. Here's ten seconds of data. You can see how the vibrations get larger and smaller, depending on how you move. And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the ______ and go and touch the screen, that voice-coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the ________ that you're touching the real _______, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real ______. We can create very compelling illusions. We can do this for all kinds of surfaces and it's really a lot of fun. We call it ___________ — haptic ___________. And I think it has _________ ________ in all _____ of areas like online ________, maybe interactive ______ exhibits, where you're not ________ to touch the precious _________, but you always want to. The second example I want to tell you about comes from a collaboration I have with Dr. Margrit ______ at the Penn Dental School. Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities. Of course they look at X-rays, but a large part of this clinical judgment comes from what they feel when they touch your teeth with a dental explorer. You've all had this happen, they go across. What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the ______ is ________ to decay. These _____ of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet. And you want them to learn this before they start practicing on real human patients. So what we do is add an accelerometer on to the ______ explorer, and then we record what Dr. Maggio feels as she touches different extracted teeth. And we can play it back for you as a video with a touch track — not just a sound track, but also a touch track, that you can feel by _______ that repeating tool. You feel the same things the dentist felt when they did the _________, and practice ______ judgments. So here's a sample one. Here's a tooth that looks kind of suspicious, right? It has all those brown stains. You might be ________, "We should definitely put a _______ in this tooth." But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this _____ are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling. And these are exactly the kind of _________ doctors make every day and I think this technology we've invented has a lot of potential for many different things in medical training, because it's really ______ and it does a great job at recreating what people feel through tools. I think it could also help make games more interactive and fun and more _________ in the sensations that you feel. The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement. So if any of you have ever learned sports, how do you get good at something like surfing? You practice. You practice some more and more, right? Making small corrections, maybe getting some _____ from a _____, learning how to improve your _______. I think we could use _________ to help make that process more efficient and more fun. And so here, for example, if I have six different arm movements that I want you to learn, you come into my lab at Penn and try out our system. We use a Kinect to _______ your motions, we show graphics on the screen, and then we also give you touch cues, haptic feedback on your arm, _________ by these haptic arm bands which have motors inside, and guide you as you move. So, if we put it together, as you're trying to track this motion, if you deviate — say, maybe, your arm is a little too high — we turn on the motors right there on the skin to let you know you should move down, almost like a coach gently guiding you and helping you master these _________ more quickly and make more precise corrections. We _________ this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports ________ as well. So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years. I've shown you three ________. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great ________ who work with me in my lab at Penn and my collaborators. They're a great group. I also want to thank you for your kind attention. (Applause)

Solution


  1. realistic
  2. touch
  3. types
  4. developed
  5. delivered
  6. sorts
  7. piece
  8. measure
  9. advantage
  10. forces
  11. shopping
  12. museum
  13. making
  14. photography
  15. sense
  16. judgments
  17. motions
  18. students
  19. objects
  20. understand
  21. illusion
  22. haptography
  23. starting
  24. artifacts
  25. supposed
  26. benefits
  27. movements
  28. training
  29. moved
  30. dental
  31. recording
  32. surface
  33. remember
  34. capture
  35. potential
  36. sensor
  37. stylus
  38. examples
  39. coach
  40. world
  41. human
  42. input
  43. filling
  44. simple
  45. maggio
  46. showing
  47. kinesthetic
  48. holding
  49. engineer
  50. beautiful
  51. components
  52. enamel
  53. canvas
  54. computers
  55. tooth
  56. thinking

Original Text


I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography. And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can remember all the beautiful and interesting things that I've seen. But what I can't do is record and share how these objects feel to touch. And that's kind of surprising, because your sense of touch is really important. It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, anything you do in the world. So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting. It has two main components. The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin. And the second is kinesthetic sensations. This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the forces you encounter. And you're really good at incorporating both of these types of sensations together to understand the physical interactions you have with the world and understand as you touch a surface: is it a rock, is it a cat, is it a bunny, what is it? And so, as an engineer, I'm really fascinated and I have a lot of respect for how good people are with their hands. And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the human capability with the sense of touch. Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines by letting you take advantage of your hands? And indeed, I think we can, and that's at the core of a field called haptics, and this is the area that I work in. It's all about interactive touch technology. And the way it works is, as you move your body through the world, if, as an engineer, I can make a system that can measure that motion, and then present to you sensations over time that kind of make sense, that match up with what you might feel in the real world, I can fool you into thinking you're touching something even though there's nothing there. So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn. The first one is all about that same problem that I was showing you: how can we capture how objects feel and recreate those experiences? So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside. It has a force sensor, so we can tell how hard you're pushing; it has motion tracking, so we can tell exactly where you've moved it; and it has a vibration sensor, an accelerometer, inside, that detects the shaking back and forth of the tool that lets you know that's a piece of canvas and not a piece of silk or something else. Then we take the data we record from these interactions. Here's ten seconds of data. You can see how the vibrations get larger and smaller, depending on how you move. And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the stylus and go and touch the screen, that voice-coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the illusion that you're touching the real surface, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real canvas. We can create very compelling illusions. We can do this for all kinds of surfaces and it's really a lot of fun. We call it haptography — haptic photography. And I think it has potential benefits in all sorts of areas like online shopping, maybe interactive museum exhibits, where you're not supposed to touch the precious artifacts, but you always want to. The second example I want to tell you about comes from a collaboration I have with Dr. Margrit Maggio at the Penn Dental School. Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities. Of course they look at X-rays, but a large part of this clinical judgment comes from what they feel when they touch your teeth with a dental explorer. You've all had this happen, they go across. What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the enamel is starting to decay. These types of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet. And you want them to learn this before they start practicing on real human patients. So what we do is add an accelerometer on to the dental explorer, and then we record what Dr. Maggio feels as she touches different extracted teeth. And we can play it back for you as a video with a touch track — not just a sound track, but also a touch track, that you can feel by holding that repeating tool. You feel the same things the dentist felt when they did the recording, and practice making judgments. So here's a sample one. Here's a tooth that looks kind of suspicious, right? It has all those brown stains. You might be thinking, "We should definitely put a filling in this tooth." But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this tooth are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling. And these are exactly the kind of judgments doctors make every day and I think this technology we've invented has a lot of potential for many different things in medical training, because it's really simple and it does a great job at recreating what people feel through tools. I think it could also help make games more interactive and fun and more realistic in the sensations that you feel. The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement. So if any of you have ever learned sports, how do you get good at something like surfing? You practice. You practice some more and more, right? Making small corrections, maybe getting some input from a coach, learning how to improve your motions. I think we could use computers to help make that process more efficient and more fun. And so here, for example, if I have six different arm movements that I want you to learn, you come into my lab at Penn and try out our system. We use a Kinect to measure your motions, we show graphics on the screen, and then we also give you touch cues, haptic feedback on your arm, delivered by these haptic arm bands which have motors inside, and guide you as you move. So, if we put it together, as you're trying to track this motion, if you deviate — say, maybe, your arm is a little too high — we turn on the motors right there on the skin to let you know you should move down, almost like a coach gently guiding you and helping you master these movements more quickly and make more precise corrections. We developed this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports training as well. So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years. I've shown you three examples. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great students who work with me in my lab at Penn and my collaborators. They're a great group. I also want to thank you for your kind attention. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
objects feel 2



Important Words


  1. accelerometer
  2. acknowledge
  3. actuator
  4. add
  5. advantage
  6. applause
  7. applications
  8. area
  9. areas
  10. arm
  11. artifacts
  12. attention
  13. bands
  14. beautiful
  15. benefits
  16. bit
  17. body
  18. bracket
  19. brown
  20. bunny
  21. call
  22. called
  23. canvas
  24. capability
  25. capture
  26. cat
  27. cavities
  28. clinical
  29. coach
  30. collaboration
  31. collaborators
  32. coming
  33. compelling
  34. components
  35. computer
  36. computers
  37. core
  38. corrections
  39. create
  40. creating
  41. cues
  42. curious
  43. dance
  44. data
  45. day
  46. decay
  47. delivered
  48. dental
  49. dentist
  50. depending
  51. detects
  52. developed
  53. deviate
  54. doctors
  55. dr
  56. dragged
  57. efficient
  58. enamel
  59. encounter
  60. engineer
  61. engineering
  62. examples
  63. exhibits
  64. experiences
  65. explorer
  66. extracted
  67. fascinated
  68. favorite
  69. feedback
  70. feel
  71. feeling
  72. feels
  73. felt
  74. field
  75. filling
  76. fool
  77. force
  78. forces
  79. fun
  80. games
  81. gently
  82. give
  83. good
  84. graphics
  85. great
  86. group
  87. guide
  88. guiding
  89. hands
  90. happen
  91. haptic
  92. haptics
  93. haptography
  94. hard
  95. healthy
  96. hear
  97. helping
  98. high
  99. hobby
  100. holding
  101. human
  102. illusion
  103. illusions
  104. important
  105. improve
  106. incorporating
  107. input
  108. interaction
  109. interactions
  110. interactive
  111. interesting
  112. interfaces
  113. intrigued
  114. invented
  115. involved
  116. job
  117. judgment
  118. judgments
  119. kind
  120. kinds
  121. kinect
  122. kinesthetic
  123. lab
  124. large
  125. larger
  126. learn
  127. learned
  128. learning
  129. lets
  130. letting
  131. leveraging
  132. lot
  133. love
  134. machines
  135. maggio
  136. main
  137. making
  138. manipulation
  139. margrit
  140. master
  141. match
  142. mathematical
  143. measure
  144. mechanical
  145. medical
  146. model
  147. moment
  148. motion
  149. motions
  150. motors
  151. mouth
  152. move
  153. moved
  154. movement
  155. movements
  156. moving
  157. museum
  158. objects
  159. online
  160. part
  161. patient
  162. patients
  163. pay
  164. penn
  165. pennsylvania
  166. people
  167. photographs
  168. photography
  169. physical
  170. piece
  171. play
  172. plays
  173. position
  174. potential
  175. practice
  176. practicing
  177. precious
  178. precise
  179. present
  180. pretty
  181. problem
  182. process
  183. professor
  184. program
  185. put
  186. quickly
  187. real
  188. realistic
  189. record
  190. recording
  191. recreate
  192. recreating
  193. rehabilitation
  194. relationships
  195. remember
  196. repeating
  197. research
  198. respect
  199. rock
  200. sample
  201. school
  202. screen
  203. seconds
  204. sensations
  205. sense
  206. sensor
  207. sensors
  208. shaking
  209. share
  210. shopping
  211. show
  212. showing
  213. shown
  214. signal
  215. silk
  216. simple
  217. skin
  218. small
  219. smaller
  220. soft
  221. solve
  222. sorts
  223. sound
  224. sports
  225. stains
  226. start
  227. starting
  228. sticky
  229. stroke
  230. student
  231. students
  232. stylus
  233. supposed
  234. surface
  235. surfaces
  236. surfing
  237. surprising
  238. suspicious
  239. system
  240. tablet
  241. tactile
  242. task
  243. teach
  244. technology
  245. teeth
  246. ten
  247. thinking
  248. time
  249. tool
  250. tools
  251. tooth
  252. touch
  253. touched
  254. touches
  255. touching
  256. track
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  258. training
  259. travel
  260. turn
  261. types
  262. understand
  263. university
  264. vibration
  265. vibrations
  266. video
  267. white
  268. work
  269. works
  270. world
  271. years