Get in Touch With Your PC
The latest in computer technology--bumps, nibbles, and pokes
More than 100 patents later, he believes touch-enhanced devices can be more than just fun and games. Adding a sense of touch to mundane computing tasks improves efficiency. Program windows can be made to feel elastic when a user stretches them. Buttons or hyperlinks on a Web page can be perceived as bumps on an otherwise smooth surface, check boxes come across as indentations, and sliding a scroll box can feel like running the mouse inside a smooth groove. Spreadsheet users feel the cursor bump from cell to cell, and unique sensations can help identify what kinds of data belong in which cells. "We will have succeeded," contends Immersion chief technology officer Bruce Schena, "if in 10 years you interact with a computer and say, `Whoa. Something's wrong here. I'm not feeling anything.' "
Touchy knobs. Soon haptics technology will migrate not only to laptop touchpads but to vehicles as well. BMW plans to introduce a haptic knob in some of its 2002 models that will replace half a dozen other control buttons, dials, and switches. Nudge the knob up, and it turns itself into a smoothly clicking radio station finder. Bump it down, and it becomes an air conditioning controller. Side to side, pulled up, or pushed down, the single knob becomes whatever the car's designers need it to be.
At the high end, industrial designers are using $90,000 touch-enabled gloves to explore car interiors, engines, and other complex machinery still on the drawing boards. While the sensations are not quite real world--drumming virtual fingertips on a virtual tabletop produces a spongy sensation rather than a crisp, solid tap--engineers can still manipulate three-dimensional designs, hefting parts and running fingers along surfaces, without first having to manufacture a prototype.
For now, though, consumers experience haptics research most directly when they want to be entertained. As the price of force feedback devices drops below $50, getting the feel of computer games and reaching out to touch Web pages could become compelling activities, notes Jim Forbes, editor of DemoLetter, which tracks emerging companies and their technologies. Immersion's efforts "are a point of light," Forbes says. And to the ailing personal computer industry, they could provide a much-needed touch of life.
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