•Engineers at MIT have developed a flexible sheet embedded with optical fibres capable of digitally reconstructing its own shape even as it is flexed and folded, according to a report by PC Gamer. The team says the technology could eventually be fashioned into a garment that mirrors real-world movements in video games.
The current version remains a bulky prototype, but the researchers envision it being worn like a “second skin” capable of tracking changes in a surface’s shape rather than the movement of fixed points on a traditional motion capture suit. In a demo video, the sheet is shown to remain functional even when bent and folded.
Ljust travelling through the optical fibres inside the sheet is tracked and interpreted by a specially developed algorithm. As the sheet bends, so do the fibres, which in turn dictates how much light can pass through them—a structure known as a waveguide.
People have used waveguides to sense the shape of a line, which they have applied to a robot arm to see how it curves, but they haven’t been applied to surface shape sensing, to reconstruct the 3D shape of a surface. That’s what we’re trying to do here.
Qifan Yu, MIT mechanical engineering graduate student and co-author
Yu says the team’s algorithm reconstructs the movement of the actual sheet with a margin of error “less than 0.4 centimeters,” adding that existing designs based on rigid sensors carry errors of around 1 to 2 centimeters.
Beyond more detailed performance capture, the technology could be used to control in-game movements or aid patients undergoing physical therapy. Yu notes: “In physical therapy, you often need to gather patient data on how they are moving and stretching their arm during rehabilitation, for example. Surface shape sensing could be very useful in that way.”
The team plans to trim down the prototype. The optical fibres currently measure 1 millimetre thick, but alternative fabrication methods could potentially make them thinner than a human hair—at mere tens of micrometres.
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