Immersion shows off touchable Holograms using HoloLens and Ultrahaptics

One of the issues with Microsoft’s Holograms in the HoloLens is that you can not touch them directly, making interactions an awkward combination of pinch, zoom and other strange hand movements.

Now in a short video French company Immersion has shown what natural interaction can look like if you combine two technologies, in this case Microsoft’s HoloLens and the UltraHaptics device, which uses an array of ultrasound speakers to give users a sense of touch in mid-air.

Ultrahaptics was founded in 2013 based on technology originally developed at the University of Bristol, UK.  The device used an array of 64 miniature loudspeakers (driven at 40Khz with 15Vpp. The whole system consumes 9 Watts of power) to create high-pitched and high-intensity sound waves powerful enough to levitate a spherical bead (of up to 4mm in diameter) made of expanded polystyrene.

While UltraHaptics can not create a solid object in mid-air it can provide a small amount of ghost-like resistance to your fingers, which seems perfect for the ethereal objects created by the HoloLens.

See the devices in action below.