I am at IIT-Mumbai right now attending the Techfest. This year, among several parallel tracks, they have arranged for a Haptics track. Manav, a MTech student, who is organizing the track contacted us about a month ago asking us if we were interested to sponser and/or speak at the event. I thought it was a great opportunity to evangelize Haptics. So we agreed to sponser (in a very small way) and I agreed to come and conduct a OpenGL+OpenHaptics workshop in the Haptics track. I am really happy about the decision.
The workshop started yesterday (24th of Jan) at 10 in the morning with opening remarks from Prof. Manivannan, who is the director of “Touch Labs” at IIT Madras. This man is the god of all things Haptics in the country. I had met one of his students, Hari Vasudevan, a couple of years back. Hari, after completing his Masters course under Prof. Manivannan, went on and joined SensAble technologies and has personally contriubted huge amounts of creativity and code to the recently released QuickHaptics SDK from SensAble. After interacting with the participants of the workshop, it became very clear to me that the interest in Haptics is on the rise. A lot of BTech and MTech projects at premier institutes are now Haptics projects. It would come as no suprise to me if Haptics becomes an elective subject in most universities in the days to come.
This week has been mostly about Haptics for me. I came to Mumbai last Sunday (the 18th of Jan). From Monday to Wednesday, it was about conducting a three-day crash course on OpenHaptics to a bunch of developers at BARC. Day 1: HDAPI, Day 2: OpenGL, and Day 3: HLAPI later, they seem poised to take on challenges in their project. Good luck to them. Yesterday was my talk on OpenHaptics to a bunch of wannabe haptics developers at IITB. SensAble’s decision to slash prices of the Omni for educational institutions could not have come at a better time. After yesterday’s talk, I am sure quite a few institutions will want to make use of this opportunity and grab one of those good devices.
Everytime I come to IITB, I make it a point to meet Prof. Patil and find out about how SequelGUI is begin adopted. The results have been great!. SequelGUI (a circuit editor/simulator software based on GCF that we developed for IITB) is on its way to become a standard lab-tool in IITB, it has already become so in quite a few colleges.
I have quite a few photos from the event, which I will upload to picassa once I get back home.