Get in Touch With Your PC
The latest in computer technology--bumps, nibbles, and pokes
It's an unnerving moment the first time you stick a needle in flesh: Apply the tourniquet. Palpate the vein. Stretch the skin back slightly. Go in at an angle. Pressing, pressing, yeee-UCK, in it goes. The patient flinches. Blood flows back along the catheter.
Good thing it's just a computer simulation. Most people would hate to try that out the first time on a human being. But until Immersion Medical released its CathSim training systems in 1998, sticking living volunteers was the only way for phlebotomy students to get the point. Now more than 500 Immersion simulators are letting medical students get a feel for the basics of snipping a tissue sample from inside a lung or inspecting a colon without ever touching a patient.
Computer scientists have been striving toward virtual reality for years. They've dazzled us with realistic graphics, surrounded us with booming audio, even bombarded us with scents (story, Page 33). But as we explore these digital worlds, something always seems to be missing. If only we could put our finger on it.
That's it exactly. Of the five senses, only touch requires action to make perception occur. "People can imagine life's difficulties without sight or hearing," explains Immersion founder Louis Rosenberg. "Touch is so innate and fundamental to everything we do, people take it for granted."
Just try to function without your sense of touch. Sink your teeth into a crisp, ripe apple with your jaw numbed by Novocain. Run your fingers through a cat's fur with a latex glove on. Step nimbly off a curb when your foot is asleep. It's not easy to interact with a world you can't feel.
Video gamers figured this out long ago. Despite home computer game improvements, they're still willing to shovel money into arcade machines just to feel the recoil of a virtual gun, the road chatter of a virtual steering wheel, or the impact of a virtual explosion. Not for long. These so-called force feedback sensations are becoming a big part of games for desktop machines, as well as for video game consoles, including Sony's PlayStation 2.
Nibbles and spells. Tactile output in the new computer game Black & White has helped it to win major awards, including Best of Show at E3, the world's largest video games trade gathering. Players of the "god simulator" game who use touch-enabled mice can experience more than 100 different sensations, including fish nibbling at their hands, the tug of uprooting a tree, the heartbeats of worshipers, and the pulsing power of casting a spell. And no matter which company is listed on the outside of the box providing the bumps, blips, and whirs, chances are that the technology came from Immersion in San Jose, Calif.
That's exactly what Rosenberg had in mind when he created Immersion Corp. in 1993. The company grew out of his Stanford University doctoral research into haptics, the science of the sense of touch. As part of his dissertation work, Rosenberg simulated different sensations using $100,000-plus force feedback joysticks more commonly found in military and flight training systems. Test subjects were delighted with the devices, and Rosenberg realized if he could create such things cheaply and in volume, he would have the makings of a consumer hit on his hands.
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.
This story appears in the August 6, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.