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Current State of Haptic Research
prostoalex writes "An article on InformIT.com looks at the current state of haptic technologies: "In the consumer realm, two companies dominate the field in the creation of tactile I/O devices: Immersion Corporation and SensAble Technologies. Right now, each seems interested in consolidating a position in the marketplace.""
Is Immersion the company that sued Sony and Microsoft over certain portions and uses of their force feedback functionalities?
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
The device is a little hard to see in the picture: A person lies prone on a table, front or back down. Then a computer guided "thingee" hanging from a ceiling wire slides back and forth various parts of your skin. I think it can change the amount of pressure. The version at the show appeared to be entirely computer-run. People using it reported either being soothed or tickled.
I presume this could be converted into a teledildonic device by adding human control to the machine. Someone could say something erotic and touch various places on the body.
Did anyone else get one of these? I actually thought it wasn't bad - it's an optical mouse that used Immersion's force-feedback tech:o ller/ifeel/ l t.asp
:)
http://www.sharkygames.com/hardware/reviews/contr
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ifeelmm/defau
You'd think that f-f in a mouse would throw off the cursor but that wasn't really the case; it had five or six modes from gentle to pretty strong, and was supported by a few games (as well as pretty pointless desktop & MS Office integration).
I got it when Black & White came out 'cause I was intrigued by B&W's game control interface (a single "hand" cursor that changed depending on the environment, and even used gestures to cast spells). Esp. liked the way they customised a few missions for this mouse -- one in particular was great: you found an old hippy/head-type guy standing by a cauldron scratching his head. He was looking for some mushrooms but wasn't sure which one would give him the best trip, so you had to go picking for him & when the cursor hovered over each one the force-feedback would buzz depending on how strong the 'shroom was
Shame they never took off, really, I'd have thought -- esp. given the prevalence of the mouse as a PC game controller -- that there may have been a half-decent market for them, but, hey, I guess not? Suppose it's one of those things that most people are pretty indifferent to, and without the support of major developers it wasn't going to go too far. Ah well!
I used to run a web page devoted to FF and haptics called Force One, back in the day. I've been out to visit with both SensAble and Immersion; they both make very advanced and very different products.
The article mentioned goes into better detail, but in short, Immersion is in the retail and medical space, while SensAble is in the industrial and design spaces.
It's interesting to see what's happened in the consumer space in the past few years; there was a strong push in the very beginning from companies like Logitech and Microsoft (amongst others) to put FF on the map in gaming. As it's turned out, there's no longer a big focus on it; graphics have remained the dominant force (sorry, bad pun!) in gaming. Even sound is falling off the map; FF is far down the list of developer's priorities.
This has always bothered me; while graphics have had a huge focus, and therefore have progressed at a breakneck pace, haptics and other sensory channels have been largely ignored. At one point there was a researcher working with technology that would stimulate your vestibular nerves externally with an electric field. This nerve controls your sense of balance and motion; he'd put together an API that would interface with 3D graphics. So you'd wear this device that had metal contacts that go behind your ears, and you'd "feel" the motion in a first-person game. (He claimed no one ever got motion sick in testing. I call BS.)
I hope they continue moving forward with some of this stuff.
I worked last summer at the lab where one of SensAble's SIGGRAPH demos of a musical haptics program was developed. An executive at the company is actually my father's patient now.
Watching the evolution of the haptics program was really neat; it was very intuitive and pretty in the last stage, but I still did not see how one could compose music with it easily (the program featured 3D surfaces which after being manipulated could produce music if you stroked them with the onscreen cursor).
Haptics is really neat; hopefully, more software will use superior controllers in the future. If you've never seen haptics in action, I suggest you try it out!