Relocation of haptic feedback from the fingertips to the wrist has been considered as a way to enable haptic interaction with mixed reality virtual environments while leaving the fingers free for other tasks. We present a pair of wrist-worn tactile haptic devices and a virtual environment to study how various mappings between fingers and tactors affect task performance. The haptic feedback rendered to the wrist reflects the interaction forces occurring between a virtual object and virtual avatars controlled by the index finger and thumb. We performed a user study comparing four different finger-to-tactor haptic feedback mappings and one no-feedback condition as a control. We evaluated users' ability to perform a simple pick-and-place task via the metrics of task completion time, path length of the fingers and virtual cube, and magnitudes of normal and shear forces at the fingertips. We found that multiple mappings were effective, and there was a greater impact when visual cues were limited. We discuss the limitations of our approach and describe next steps toward multi-degree-of-freedom haptic rendering for wrist-worn devices to improve task performance in virtual environments.

A video shows an incredible bionic arm moving'like a human hand' controlled by the patient's thoughts. The modern prosthetic, designed by engineers, gives hope to amputees who have to rely on plastic moulds with barely any dexterity. Scientists created a so-called'nerve interface' which picks up tiny electrical signals coming from the remaining nerves of an amputee's upper arm. It has allowed patients to use just their thoughts to precisely move the fingers and thumbs of their artificial hand, even enabling them to play rock, paper, scissors. The Mobius Bionics LUKE arm, developed by a medical device company in the US, has been tested on four patients. Amputee Joe Hamilton said using the prosthetic is like'having a hand again' after he was able to place tiny building blocks on top of each other.

On the occasion of my sixtieth birthday, my friend Lenny visited me from Toronto. He is seven years older than me, and he gave me some sound advice: respect the limitations of your body. Lenny said that he no longer climbs ladders, even though he is a yoga instructor and his balance is good--climbing ladders just seems like a risky thing for a sixtysomething to do. The advice came just after I had binge-watched the first season of "Westworld," a TV series about machines gaining human consciousness (something that I, like many cognitive neuroscience professors, have been teaching for over ten years). In the world of the show, the bodies of the robots, unlike your body and mine, are easily repaired. A vast robot-repair shop remanufactures and reattaches severed limbs, and efficiently closes gaping wounds. For the past few years, I've been on a kick that I call the "pre-mortem": thinking ahead to what could go wrong and putting systems in place to minimize the damage if they do go wrong. For instance, I got a landline, in case the cell networks go down in a natural disaster such as an earthquake. I've taken cell-phone photos of my passport and credit cards, in case they get lost. I taped an emergency-phone-number list to the inside of the kitchen cabinet that is nearest the phone, and I put a combination-lock box in the back of my house to hold a front-door key, in case I lock myself out. I must have struck a chord with this idea, because my TED talk about it went viral. My wife, Heather, and I have our bedroom upstairs, and there is only one way out in case of a fire--down the stairs and out the front door.