a mouse that gives feedback (2000)
Buy a computer and you can expect full colour graphics, stereo surround sound and so much disc space it would be churlish to complain. But imagine telling the computer salesperson that more than see and hear what’s happening on the screen, you want to feel it too. And just to be sure they send you away sharply, explain that when you move your mouse over a picture of some rocky terrain, on a map say, you want to be able to feel as well as see the bumps.
Novel as it may be, being able to feel a way round the screen is a possible key to the visually impaired using everyday computers. Surprisingly, technology you can buy today is close to offering a solution.
The technology is a spin-off from ‘force feedback’ – a feature which adds realism to joystick and steering wheel games. For example, when you drive a car in a racing game you feel the engine start, or feel a jolt when the car crashes; when you a fly an aeroplane you feel the weight of the joystick as you pull out of a dive. All this is well established and easy: many of the games on the market send signals to the works inside a special joystick and deliver the appropriate kick to the stick as you play.
But now the mechanism has been built into a desktop mouse, sensations such as gravity, texture and springiness are starting to find more pedestrian uses. The force feedback mouse, created by Logitech, long-time makers of mice and keyboards, lets your hand sense textures, buttons, menus and Web page links on the screen. With it you can feel your way around a Windows program: feel the sliders and button edges, feel your hand gently pulled towards a window border, and feel springiness as you pull the window open. You can feel your way around the Web too, bumping over the hyperlinks and check boxes on every page. Uncanny notions like ‘big files are heavier and seem harder to move around’ – or that protected files are ‘stuck’ to the Windows folder get you thinking about what is missing from this computer world.
California based ‘Immersion Technology’ is a firm behind this. They are investing to bring the sense of touch into computing and their Dr Louis Rosenberg is an expert on haptics, the science of human touch. He explains that there are two sides to his ‘Touchsense technology’, “A whole side to what this can do is what you would call the perceptual side. Everything the mouse interacts with you can feel. When the cursor hits the surface you can feel the surface, when you stretch something you can feel it stretch. The second part of it is improving your performance. In the real world you have a sense of touch not just to understand your surroundings but to manipulate them”.
This ‘perceptual side’ would interest anyone developing software for teaching. Simulations, for example, illustrating friction, inertia, gravity or the forces holding atoms together might now make their teaching points very easily. Similarly, for geography say, the contours lines of a map can be translated into the hills and bumps they represent and force fed back to the student.
Rosenberg’s claim to offer improved mouse performance stands up to the simplest test. With the help of the feedback mouse, you will find the cursor physically drawn to targets and buttons on screen. Hitting cities on a map was 80% improved when we could feel the cursor. So for those with neuromotor disabilities who might find it hard to use the mouse due to a hand tremor, the improvement in their targeting is dramatic.
If for older folk, where ageing degrades their mouse agility, it offers an interesting aid, the benefits to the visually impaired seem extremely promising. Immersion have been experimenting with a system that combines touch feedback with voice prompts. Here a voice speaks menu items as you move the cursor up and down it. Adds Rosenberg “We found that people who are blind could navigate Windows, and even more exciting was that they could navigate the Internet. We believe that this is the technology path that will ultimately make the Internet accessible to them”
It’s not all blue skies as being able to touch things on screen could take off – driven not just by games but by the current growth of shopping on the Internet. Traders wanting to enhance their offerings, to let people feel the goods, or try them out can now offer shoppers mind-boggling opportunities to feel, drag and drop their merchandise. And then there are those wanting to cater for visually impaired shoppers or online learners, who cannot get around as easily as everyone else.
Interestingly, with the mouse costing £80, none of this ought to be too far away. Immersion has released a free kit of tools to encourage those wanting to develop applications of the technology. If you’re that keen, you can use the TouchSense software development kit to associate a texture sensation to a mouse action on screen. The kit has a library of sensation files that a developer can use much like a clip art library.
Next time you’re in a computer shop, look out for the force-feedback mouse. Could it be that one day, like graphics, speakers and modems, you’ll not buy a computer without?
Logitech www.logitech.com
Immersion Corp. www.immersion.com
For TES 2000 by Roger Frost