Acoustic Hologram Integrated with Augmented and Virtual Realities for Communication

Project #2.27 begins 2026.

Augmented and virtual realities (AR/VR) are digital engineering (DE) approaches that create digital environments with deepened and extended sensory participation to alter and expand the means of information dissemination. While AR/VR has provided an important tool for immersive communications in various fields, current developments of AR and VR technologies focus mostly on visual and motion experiences via heads-up displays, headsets, and motion sensors. Haptic sensing, as a crucial sensory experience for humans to touch and feel the interactions, is not well explored. Existing haptic technology centers on developing motorized finger wearable devices to display stiffness sensations. However, finger-wearable technology can hardly recreate the touch sensation in three-dimensional (3D) environments. Airborne acoustic waves are pressure waves that would be ideal for modulating touchs ensation. While recent advances in acoustic holography provide good possibilities to generate desired 3D pressure fields, 3D dynamic haptic sensation harnessing acoustic hologram is not well developed.

The vision of this proposed research is to drastically advance the state-of-the-art human-machine interface by developing the needed foundation via pioneering the design framework of acoustic haptic hologram in the 3D AR and VR environments to enhance human-autonomy communication by integrating the sensation of touch into DE. Surpassing the traditional approaches using wearable electronics, this proposed research would uncover knowledge to create systems that can generate highly reconfigurable dynamic contactless force profiles to realize a more realistic real-time 3D touch sensation. Moreover, we are paving a novel path to add real-time active information gathering for human soldiers from combat vehicles through enhanced human-machine haptic communication.

Highly reconfigurable active 3D acoustic holograms are especially ideal for one to realize a 3D real-time sensation of touch because the desired pressure profiles generated by the holograms result in highly controllable contactless radiation forces in both space and time domains. However, the basic research of 3D dynamic acoustic haptic holograms and their integration with AR and VR has yet to be explored. That is, there is a critical gap between the envisioned acoustic hologram and the 3D real-time sensation of touch. We envision that acoustic haptic holograms will be capable of generating arbitrary desired radiation force profiles in both the 3D space and time domains according to the AR/VR conditions obtained from DE. In the context of designing the acoustic haptic hologram, the desired AR/VR profiles generated by DE are fed into a computational unit to obtain the desired 3D acoustic pressure and radiation force profiles at target locations. The desired 3D acoustic pressure profile is used to compute the signals needed for a designed acoustic transducer array to generate the holographic patterns. The computed signals are sent to the acoustic transducer array to generate the desired 3D acoustic pressure fields to create the targeted radiation force profiles for the realization of touch sensation in the AR/VR environment. This DE process occurs continuously and dynamically over time to create an immersive experience and dynamic reconfiguration that match the real-time 3D environment.

#2.27