Piezo strings as haptic exciters

Ideas
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Hi! I’m interested in the OTHER property of those piezo strings, which is as exciters. That is, send a signal into it, it moves. This way, you could make haptic sleeves or other materials that can express haptics lightly and with low voltages (I hope).

There are some devices like haptic chairs and suits, but they all have too many moving parts for my taste. It’s like you are sitting on a buzzing phone all day.

The cool thing about a haptic setup is that although sound is stereo, and with HRTF’s you can get a nice 3 D effect, you could have 6 or 8 simultaneous haptic channels going for some pretty extreme haptic polyphony. A piezo fabric could also be set up to express 2d skin patterns vis good old phase cancellation. That is, if it works at all.

I’m the guy behind the very sleepy and not worked on haptician.org, the idea of which is to actually get something parallel to music that is sensed haptically, and preferably not electronically (sorry).

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I’ve investigated this extensively (even with the help of a research grant by Bauhaus-Universität Weimar). However the results are sobering. There needs to be a very high electric potential to get any results. +/- 200V, so 400V at a minimum. But even then there is hardly anything perceivable. I’ve given up on this as nobody could give me definitive answers up to which power levels I could operate this safely. Even though the ground shielding should theoretically protect you, as you are not touching the core, I did not want to die experimenting further.

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Too bad! I guess gluing on lots of little ceramic piezos instead would have to do!