The 3D Systems Touch Haptic 3D Stylus and the OpenHaptics SDK for digital design and virtual gaming represent a virtual sculpting software tool to transform 3D modeling from a complicated, skill-dependent design experience to a simple, experiential sculpting program for artists, students, designers and hobbyists.
The Touch will be featured and demonstrated at the International CES 2015, and the event will include a virtual reality demo game called HapStack.
HapStack was developed by the Art School of Glasgow, Digital Design Studio, and it made use of the OpenHaptics Software Development Kit.
The game uses both the Oculus Rift VR headset and the Touch haptic stylus to lead players on an immersive journey to Mars, and HapStack is available as a free download from Cubify with the purchase of the Touch.
“We are absolutely thrilled to introduce our new Touch Haptic 3D stylus,” says Peter Theran, the Vice President of Global Consumer Products for 3DS, “(It’s) a powerful – and affordable – perceptual tool for the benefit of all gamers, artist and designers.”
According to 3D Systems, the package is priced at $599.
The company says Touch Haptic Stylus interacts with a user’s physical touch, and if you’re lucky enough to make the scene at CES this year, you can participate in a live competition of the HapStack game at the 3DS booth located at the Sands Expo, booth 72225.
The top scorers each day in the competition will win a Sense 3D Scanner.
And 3DS say that, to encourage application development with the OpenHaptics SDK, the company has partnered with TopCoder to launch a challenge series for Touch apps in virtual gaming, education, art and digital design for jewelry, medical applications and more. The TopCoder challenge series will center on demonstrating how haptics, virtual reality and 3D printing can be used to create a “digital thread” aimed at opening “new worlds of human-machine interaction.”
If you’re a developer interested in participating in the TopCoder challenge series, you can register using the 3DS Developer’s Portal.
“3D printing, virtual reality and haptics are three new technologies that are having a profound impact on our personal and professional lives,” said Narinder Singh, President of Topcoder. “Topcoder is excited to help 3D Systems democratize digital design and application development by leveraging our global crowdsourcing community to generate creative ideas and quickly connect to the right talent.”
If you can’t make it to the CES show this year, you can join Avi Reichental, the President and CEO of 3D Systems, during a broadcast of 3DS’ events and new product releases by visiting www.3dsystems.com/ces. Just click the link to view this broadcast, which starts at 4:00 PM EST on Tuesday, January 6, 2015.
For more details on 3DS’ at CES 2015, you can check out www.3dsystems.com/ces, and to see more about Appirio and their 700,000 member Topcoder community and crowdsourcing platform, visit them at Appirio.com.
Tools like the Touch Haptic Stylus are aimed at bringing what has previously been the exclusive toolkit of developers to the masses. Let us know if you plan to be on hand at the CES show this year and enter the Topcoder Challenge on the 3D Systems Touch Haptic 3D Stylus forum thread on 3DPB.com.
