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 devices are 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.

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.

Makinen is working on some larger projects right now for museums and corporate clients but expects to have some working devices in production in a year. This could definitely change the way we interact with touchscreens.

The proprietary Senseg E-Sense surface and driving electronics create a small pressure between finger tissue and Senseg E-Sense surface, using a field effect. Modulation of the pressure creates easily controllable, pleasant vibration-like touch sensations.

The energies involved are very low: peak power consumption is 0.05 to 0.5 watts. Senseg E-Sense is protected by nearly twenty patent applications internationally.

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.

By using ultrasonic transducers that emit interfering sound waves to a focal point, a virtual object can be perceived by touch. As you can see from the photo, so far only verticality has been established. While the system is able track hand movements to determine where on the ‘object’ the hand is located, researchers hope to improve on the geometry to give a more substantial feel with more detail. Certainly a more involved array would be in the works.

Naturally, anyone who ever seen live music might immediately consider the effect of this set-up to the ear. And they would be right too. Standing in front of a loud amplifier pushes air at you and this works in pretty much the same way. Intensity will certainly be a limiting factor. As awesome as this sounds, I’ll believe it when I feel it – and when my ears don’t.

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.

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.

Yes, writer Daniel H. Wilson takes us on an A to Z journey on everything haptic—oh, right, what is haptic? (Or is that “haptics”?) It’s sorta like, you know how when you push a button you get that “oh man I just pushed a button” tactile feedback feeling? When using something like a touchscreen, that feeling is what haptic tech is trying to replicate via vibration. Imagine if when you were sending a text message on the iPhone, the phone would vibrate every so slightly every time you inputted a character. That’s what haptics is all about.

Now, you may be a cynical jerk like me and think to yourself, why go through all that trouble trying to replicate the sensation of pushing a button when you can, you know, just push a button? Wilson explains:

Touchscreens and touch-sensitive surfaces with haptic feedback give product designers greater flexibility. Since touchscreen devices aren’t tied to any particular layout, they can be reconfigured for each application, yet still offer the sensory feedback of physical knobs and buttons.

Well there you have it. Don’t I feel like a tool.

Expect haptics to make its way into numerous devices in the coming months and years. 3D worlds à la Second Life, so the article says, will be made easier to navigate because you can feel your way around, so to speak. The military will use it to help control remote controlled robots. Phones will use it to give that warm, button-just-pushed feeling.

Haptics, watch for it.

How Haptics Will Change the Way We Interact With Machines [PopularMechanics]

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. 

According to a press release by Carnegie Mellon,

The system eliminates the bulky links, cables and general mechanical complexity of other haptic devices on the market today in favor of a single lightweight moving part that floats on magnetic fields.

At the heart of the maglev haptic interface is a bowl-shaped device called a flotor that is embedded with six coils of wire. Electric current flowing through the coils interacts with powerful permanent magnets underneath, causing the flotor to levitate. A control handle is attached to the flotor.

A user moves the handle much like a computer mouse, but in three dimensions with six degrees of freedom — up/down, side to side, back/forth, yaw, pitch and roll. Optical sensors measure the position and orientation of the flotor, and this information is used to control the position and orientation of a virtual object on the computer display. As this virtual object encounters other virtual surfaces and objects, corresponding signals are transmitted to the flotor’s electrical coils, resulting in haptic feedback to the user.

Levitating Computer Interface Heads to Universities Nationwide [DailyTech]