Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500716
78 S U M M E R 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y But you can hear the actuators, and they can enhance the experience if you're in the hearing world. DB: Correct. Yes. Lower than 10 Hertz, you'll feel like tapping. It doesn't feel like vibrations anymore. But let's say between 10 Hertz and 20 Hertz, you start feeling the vibrations, and then up to 400 Hertz are like the golden area. You feel everything. But it's capped at 1,000 Hertz, usually. I started calling it "The Art of Haptics" because it's not a translation of music. The idea is to bring the excitement of loud music without damaging your ears and the excitement-enhanced experience of the lower stuff. But because I decoupled the experience, there's no direct relationship between what is produced and the frequencies we use. So it's not like 1 kHz music is a 1 kHz frequency. DB: Exactly. We can express a whole different palette of emotions and textures and things. PH: There is definitely a small mind shift, but then very intuitive for a tech person to know what they want to do or convey with the tools. We are also now able to blend seamlessly into any venue using Dante, stage splits, or even a stereo feed. It works flawlessly. I do love the orchestral work where you can feel the different sections on different parts of the body, feeling that section's emotion and the whole orchestra on your body as one ebb and flow. It is a creative expression using completely different vibrational frequencies to describe related patterns without using necessarily similar auditory frequencies. DB: Yes. Because that way, we celebrate the skin and its most beautiful thing, which is texture, placement, and amplitude, and you have different sensations in different areas of your body. For example, the wrists are extremely sensitive, but the middle of your back, your spine is not. Are those the three pillars? Texture, placement, and amplitude? DB: I would say frequency as well. PH: This was a huge step. It was a realization that we can now empower people with this tool and they can operate it just like opening up a plugin; a touch more complicated at that time, but heading in that direction. DB: Just last year, we presented in England, Japan, and several places in the US. We worked with Lincoln Center, Philadelphia Opera, and the Brazilian Symphonic Orchestra in Brazil. We did the Mighty Hoopla event with Vodafone in England. We won The Challenge for Toyota Mobility Foundation. We started providing haptic music and the sound of the cars on a racetrack … it's a whole art. It's a whole platform for artistic expression using the skin as the canvas as the outlet for that expression. PH: Toyota was a test for us. An unknown, we thought it through. I took audio and Daniel was programming. We went for a quick test day one, I put up some mics. Again, boom! I was blown away. At that point I was like, we can do anything ... like anything. But how does it work? How much is a literal frequency reproduction compared to a complementary subjective experience? DB: The skin responds very differently from the ears. The ears go from 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz, generally in very young, healthy adults. But the skin stops at 1,000 Hertz. So, the frequency discrimination of the skin is much smaller. And the optimal vibrotactile region is around 400 Hertz. So, when you start moving up the frequency range, the vibrations feel more and more pointy and tiny. So, you have a spreadable area like the focus area of the vibrations going larger... That is not unlike the increase in the size of waves for lower frequency-related sonic vibrations. DB: Exactly. But once you hit, let's say, 800 Hertz, you're not feeling anything else anymore. But our devices are capable of going into 1,500 Hertz. And you might ask why the skin doesn't perceive it because they realized that sometimes people enjoy the sound of the actuators. Certain things are only felt, certain things are heard, and certain things you can both hear and feel very well. To review, you don't really feel much past 1,000 Hertz? DB: It just disappears.