Haptic technology set to ‘touch’ all of us
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Recent product launches may trigger off the next wave of tactile technology in consumer devices
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— PHOTO: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Touch and tell: Microsoft’s Bill Gates demonstrates the touch-sensitive features of Hewlett Packard’s TouchSmart PC, running Windows Vista
Technology may be the ‘hidden hand’ — no pun intended — of etymology! The term, ‘hands-on computing’ has come to assume a whole new meaning, when your fingers do more than jab at a keyboard; when they interact with the computing surface and receive a reassuringly reciprocal sensation that tells you, that your wish is its command.
Origin of haptics
The ancient Greeks called it ‘haphe’ or ‘haptesthai’ — meaning contact or touch — the origin of the modern science of haptics: applying the sensation of touch to interact with computers.
In its earlier form this meant the use of special input/output devices like joysticks or data gloves to receive feedback from computers in the form of sensations felt in the hand and other parts of the body. It was central to technologies like Virtual Reality, which used elaborate gloves and headsets to achieve sensory realism.
Haptics have been used for medical simulations — allowing trainee surgeons to get a feel of a real operation without having to work on live subjects.
It has also been used to give the surgeon a more natural feel when deploying robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery systems, the best known of which is the DaVinci system from Intuitive Surgical. They have also been used in a variety of civil and military simulators from road vehicles to weapon systems.
All these are high-end industrial applications of haptics… and they have not ‘touched’ lay users — till now. But the explosion in ‘convergence’ devices at the confluence of PC, TV and Internet, has changed all that.
The customer’s demand
The new and emerging customer is saying: “If you want me to use a computer or surf the Internet as easily as I use my television set, then I demand the simplicity of the TV.”
Industry has heard the underlying threat in this demand. Which is why Francis Lee, Chief Executive of Synaptics, a leading maker of touch sensors, told the Associated Press last week: “This new ( touch) interface will be like a tsunami, hitting an entire spectrum of devices.”
Hewlett Packard’s new TouchSmart IQ770 PC, just launched in India, uses a 19-inch touch-sensitive screen as a user-friendly interface for all its functions — as entertainment centre, home security and control console, Internet browser and as a plain old personal computer.
Microsoft which generally touted voice as the emerging personal device interface, has nevertheless made its own ‘touching’ contribution… the ‘Surface,’ a table-top computer whose large plastic-topped surface hides a numbers of scanners, projectors and the heart of a personal computer. You could read the menu in a hotel, off the table top, touch an item to order it — then eat it at from the same surface. Perhaps the most hyped consumer offering to exploit touch technology is Apple’s i-Phone. This all-in-one, phone-multimedia-Net-access device does away entirely with the mobile phone’s keyboard and substitutes a screen that uses what is known as multi-touch technology.
You can slide a finger up and down to scroll through your address book, flick it to open and leaf through a photo album and glide it across the screen to open other applications.
Conventionally, touch sensitive screens are created by embedding a resistive or capacitive layer just beneath the exposed surface.
Touching it sets off changes in the electric current that runs between the two layers and knowing the coordinates of the spot touched on a grid, allows the computer to interpret the action.
Today’s tactile technologies have become a bit more sophisticated. For the iPhone, it has deployed a proprietary gesture-enhanced multi-touch technology.
Dummies explanation
A recent article in Popular Science gave a dummies explanation: By setting off minute tremors, much like the vibrate mode of mobile phones, it fakes the feel of a real button or key.
From my own brief experience with the iPhone its haptic technology is no match for some work-in-progress called Haptikos, that I saw at a recent Nokia technology showcase.
The ‘kick-back,’ I got when ‘touching’ a virtual key on the screen of the phone was very palpable.
Even this may seem like yesterday for customers of the latest games controller, the Falcon, from the US-based Novint Technologies. Replacing mouse and joystick with a small robot device, it provides stunning levels of tactile realism, using what is known as 3-D-Touch, technology developed by the San Francisco-based Lunar Design.
‘Pick up’ a basketball and you feel its weight and inertia; ‘fire’ a weapon and your fingers are jolted by its recoil.
Interestingly, Lunar has put 3-D-Touch into car and aircraft simulators. Now the technology that used to cost Rs 1 lakh or more is available in a games controller for the equivalent of Rs 8,000.
Truly, haptic technology seems set to ‘touch’ all of us in the months to come.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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