ENLIGHTEN3D

By Joshua Koopferstock

As if getting the required precision for surgery wasn’t hard enough in person, surgeons can now perform surgery remotely from thousands of miles away.  While it is far from mainstream, robotic surgery, including remote robotic surgery, has made leaps and bounds in the past decade.  At SIGGRAPH, I came across a technology that might give robotic surgery another shove forward.

Butterfly Haptics, launched earlier this year as a spinoff company from Carnegie Mellon University, is hard at work trying to commercialize a magnetic levitation haptic device (pictured below).  The grey handle in the center of the device floats in a magnetic field.

What Sets it Apart

The device allows 6 degrees of freedom (translation in any direction, rotation in any direction) like many haptic devices.  However, the Butterfly Haptic device separates itself from the rest in two ways.

First, despite the fact the the device is floating in a magnetic field, it can still very effectively stop your motion completely.  In one demo, you could control objects in 3D space; when you ran the object into a wall, the feeling of hitting a solid object was extremely convincing.

Second, no static friction is present as the device is floating in a magnetic field and is not mechanical.  The surface texture demo illustrating this property sold me completely to the benefits of maglev haptics.  In this demo, you were presented on screen with different surface textures that you could run over with the device, such as a solid wavy surface, a tiny ridged surface which felt something like running your fingernail over the the paper edge of a closed book and, most impressively, the “ice” (frictionless surface).  Pushing down on the surface, it was completely solid, but as you move along it in the other two dimensions, it feels absolutely frictionless like perfect ice.

Butterfly Haptics Device

Back to Surgery

It does not require explaining that in surgery, having maximum freedom of movement and realistic force feedback is optimal, if not necessary.  And it is on these two fronts that Butterfly Haptics excels.  Not only would this technology be beneficial in remote robotic surgery, but also for surgical training simulations.  With immersive 3D displays like those used in currently available robotic surgery devices and realistic force feedback, surgeons-in-training can perform highly realistic surgeries on “humans” (anatomically correct 3D models) without ever making a true incision!

The Future for Butterfly Haptics

While the maglev haptic device is currently more academic than commercial, the fact that Butterfly Haptics has been spun out of academia into the business world suggests to me that these devices may find exciting real-world applications in the near future.  What exactly those applications may be are uncertain, but the company suggests on their site that beyond medicine, the devices may be used for CAD applications, data visualization, and character animation.  The medical applications appear most promising to me, but in any case, this is a company and technology well worth keeping an eye on in the next few years.

This is only one of the many interesting technologies and research papers that we came across during SIGGRAPH last week. Expect to find more blog posts about what we saw at SIGGRAPH in the upcoming days now that I am back in beautiful Montreal.