Mike Turner, formerly a senior industrial designer with JCB, set up his own design studio in 2007. He was recently commissioned by Industrial Vehicle Technology Magazine to design a "'Wearable' industrial vehicle for materials handling, light construction and agricultural use." The result was his Chimaera concept seen above, and done in conjunction with designer Peter Spriggs.

The design of the physical, anime-esque form was one thing; the design of the interface, Turner realized, would be quite another. In his owdn words:

Working with Peter Spriggs, a talented Coventry undergraduate, I realised this was design for the operator in its purest sense - and set out to make a machine interface wholly tailored to the user. The position and size of each control interface needed to be configurable and instantly adjustable in its position and orientation, which was just not feasible with physical components.

Hit the jump to read the rest of the project description.

You can see more of Turner's stuff on Coroflot, and more of Spriggs' work as well.The answer was a virtual interface, which would be easy to reconfigure and adapt to suit anthropometric diversity, operator dexterity, experience, personal preference and machine context. With no physical controls - just hand gestures effective within a localised field generator - the system works in conjunction with a 3D projected image of the field space. The hand interacts with icons and menus in much the same way as a touch-screen, pushing, sliding, rotating and growing them as required.

Wearing a coded glove, the operator moves his hand within the field. These gestures are tracked and translated into the machine; similar to the film industry's motion-capture techniques. Gestures, icons and menus can therefore be entirely operator-specific - he can additionally develop and assign specific gestures and shortcuts for repetitive machine tasks. All this information can be uploaded and transferred to the machine as a preference data file via USB - or simply encoded into each glove.

A series of interactive floating projected spheres triangulate according to operator height and preference. Primary spheres are accessed to dictate machine movement; secondary spheres govern all incidental functions. When his hands are inside the spheres, the user can operate controls, open submenus, etc. When the spheres are 'empty', hand actions are not counted.

The operator is free to move his extremities as required, but his torso is suspended in a compliant membrane to prevent the machine misinterpreting involuntary movements. This includes sensors to receive signals from shoulder flex and hip swing, which are used to control the slew frame. Pressure pads in the floor receive signals from the feet, which govern track speed and direction - similar to the control plate used on the Segway.