Haptics: The feel-good technology of the year

great article from computerworld.com:

>>Haptics: The feel-good technology of the year

How 'high-fidelity haptics' from Immersion and Apple will transform the experience of using gadgets

Computerworld - The touch screen is taking over cell phones, and soon mobile computing and even desktop computing. Both Apple and Microsoft are working on a transition to touch-enabled versions of OS X and Windows. Touch screens are coming in, and keyboards and mice are on their way out.

But if you dread the loss of physical keyboards and mice, with their reassuring physical clicking and movement, you should know that two Silicon Valley companies plan to artificially replicate the feel of at least keyboards on touch devices. But that's just the beginning. They also intend to create high-quality feedback for other on-screen objects, such as buttons, window edges and even video game action.

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Immersion CTO Christophe Ramstein demonstrated today at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference a breathtaking new generation of haptic technologies he calls "high-fidelity haptics."

Ramstein called a volunteer onto the stage and invited her to play a pinball game on a specially configured Hewlett-Packard tablet PC. She immediately responded to the haptics, and said that she could actually "feel a metal ball rolling on a hard surface." She could feel all the motion of the game, the vibration of the whole machine and detailed, super-realistic but subtle tactile cues of the kind that you would feel with a real, physical pinball machine.

After playing for a minute or two, Ramstein threw a switch to turn off the haptics. The volunteer reported, essentially, that the game suddenly became cold and dead, even though all the graphics and sound were still in play.

This new world of high-fidelity haptics will be able to convincingly create sensations associated with sound and also with the shape and texture of onscreen objects.

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Ramstein told me in an interview that next-generation haptics will provide cues about what's happening on screen. One application of this is simulating the feel of a real keyboard on a virtual, onscreen keyboard. Haptics can be employed to simulate the feeling of moving your finger from one key to the next, even before a key is pressed.

While Immersion's next-generation "high-fidelity haptics" technology is in the prototype stage, it's almost certainly going to be baked right in to a breathtakingly wide range of consumer products over the next three years.