Feel and manipulate 3-D images

A controller developed at Carnegie Mellon University allows computer users to manipulate three-dimensional images and explore virtual environments not only through sight and sound, but by using their sense of touch.
The device, expected to be used mainly for research, training and industrial purposes, comes close to the sensitivity of the human hand.
Using magnetic fields, the socalled haptic device replicates the response a hand might have to textures and gravitational forces, the devices convey the sense of touch.
The controller — like a joystick topped with a block that can be grasped — has just one moving part and rests in a bowl-like structure connected to a computer. Two of the controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up and move virtual objects on a monitor.
Researchers had built 10 of the devices, six of which were to be sent to other universities across US and in Canada, and that a new company, Butterfly Haptics, would begin marketing the device in June or July.
The controller, which will cost “much less” than $50,000, could enable a would-be surgeon to operate on a virtual human organ and sense the texture of tissue or give a designer the feeling of fitting a part into a virtual jet engine.
The interface might also convey the feeling of wind under the wings of unmanned military planes.