Senseg.com is a haptic interface company based in Helsinki, Finland. I met with the CEO, Ville Makinen, who showed us two simple implementations of the system.
Instead of using vibrating motors, the device surface is completely motionless. Instead, the Senseg system stimulates your fingers or hand with an electrical field to simulate the feeling of friction or texture. The only way I can describe it as being a cross between rubbing soft sandpaper and getting a static electric shock whenever you touch an active point on the screen.
One obvious implementation would be for something like the iPhone. Because it uses no motors you can’t hear it and it doesn’t run down the battery. A small module – about as big as two sugar cubes – controls the sensation by connecting to a thin film that can be placed on any device. The film can even go around curves. The video you see here shows two demo products. One is a UI test with three distinct systems – a slider, a notched slider, and a rotating arrow. When you move your finger on each UI element you feel a different thing.
From the ‘I’ll Believe it When I See Feel it Dept’: Ultrasonic gaming.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo have been working on using focused ultrasound to simulate the feel of objects that aren’t there. Haptic doodads have been floating around for a while, like this Maglev joystick, but this is the first time I’ve seen one that relies on air to create the sensation.
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More news about RIMs anticipated ‘iPhone Killer’ the BlackBerry Thunder, Crackberry.com says RIM’s new touch keyboard kicks ass.
The “juicy” details include: localized haptics meaning when you pess the screen, it feels like you pressed a button on the screen, and both a full Qwerty keyboard, when the handsets in landscape mode, and SureType keyboard, for portrait mode.
Crackberry also said that according to people who have actually used the keyboard on the handset, its a “really easy and enjoyable experience.”
Word is that Thunder production is expected to start up this week, so more news on the latest iPhone killer coming soon.
MyTouchKeys is a clear plastic sticker that adds tactile feedback to your iPhone by — wait for it — putting a hole over each of the keyboard keys. While this experience can be replicated by placing gobs of dried earwax or mucous on each of the tiny keys, it is clear that a piece of plastic is a far superior solution. Now, however, I have to clean my damn iPhone.
Meet Mr. Happy
In reading this fine site of ours, you’ve no doubt occasionally come across the word “haptic.” What does it mean, you ask. I don’t know, I reply. But Popular Mechanics knows, and they know it so well, they’ve got nearly 2,000 words explaining why it’ll be the next big thing to hit consumer electronics. That is, once it makes its way out of the labs.
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Force feedback plus six dimensions of movement — I like what I’m hearing so far.
This yet-to-be-named device has been in the workings for 11+ years by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and uses a bowl-shaped apparatus connected to a joystick, all of which sits inside a larger bowl-shaped apparatus that magnetically levitates the smaller bowl.
There are only ten such devices in the world so far but the project’s been spun off into a commercial company called Butterfly Haptics (web site here) and more details will be announced at a haptics conference in Reno on March 13th and 14th.
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