Section: Highlights of the Year
Highlights of the Year
Evita
EVITA is a tactile feedback tablet, produced by Hap2U SME company, based in Grenoble. It has been presented at CES in January 2017, the SME has been awarded a CES innovation award. This device is issued from a strong collaboration with MINT group. EVITA is a very generic interaction device, and several projects are currently being discussed for understanding the fields of applications of this device. It is also, in particular, the hardware support for our haptic book for children, described below, that is our second highlight for this Raweb. XploreTouch tablet (the product sold by Hap2U) will be integrated in 2018 in "Palais de la Découverte" permanent exposure (La Villette, Paris).
Haptic book
The first digital book augmented with a high fidelity feedback was released in October 2016. Based on a scenario and illustrations made by Dominique Maes - an artist from Belgium - this haptic book was presented for the first time during "La nuit des bibliothèques" in Lille. This project had nice society visibility in 2017, with several expositions (3 exhibitions in the region in 2017, about 14 weeks of availability hired by city of Valenciennes in 2018).
GoTouchVR spinoff
Eric Vezzoli and Thomas Sednaoui (two former PhD students of the team) founded GoTouchVR company, that designs a lightweight device (the VRTouch device) for tactile feedback for VR systems. The company was present at CES 2017 and will be also present at CES 2018. An Inria Tech contract was devoted to the VRTouch SDK, taking benefit of MINT knowledge on gesture recognition and interaction design.