feel the web – haptics (2000)
Roger Frost’s column in ‘TV Technology and Production’ from when the Internet just started to get easy
Feel the web (May/June 2000)
As the first Giga Hz computer reaches the shops, its no surprise how much technology is in that machine. With 3D graphics and 3D sound as standard, some of us shudder to think we once specified a box with 16-colour graphics, a sound card and Windows. So much today is passé.
After fast machines, full colour graphics and surround sound we could wonder what will be the next thing to take for granted. Let’s suppose we could touch what we see on the computer screen. Let’s say we go to a fashion web site, pick up a shirt and feel the texture of the fabric. If you’ve avoided buying clothes on the Internet, you’ve spotted a shortcoming of e-commerce: being able to touch the merchandise is key. It starts to explain why, ladies undergarments aside, clothing does not sell well here.
If the web shopping experience has a way to go, we are on the brink of change. A ‘force feedback’ mouse from Logitech, maker of mice, joysticks and webcams, brings the sense of touch to the computer. With it you can feel Windows applications on the screen: 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, bump over the hyperlinks and check boxes on every page. Uncanny notions like ‘big files are heavy’ or system files are ‘stuck’ to the Windows folder are clues to the sensations of tomorrow’s online shopping and more.
Force feedback is best known for adding realism to joystick and steering wheel games. When you drive a car you feel the engine start, or feel a jolt when it crashes; when you a fly an aeroplane you feel the weight of the joystick as you pull out of a dive.
California based ‘Immersion Technology’ lies at the heart of bringing the sense of touch to computing. Its CEO Dr Louis Rosenberg is an expert on haptics, the science of human touch. He explains that there are two aspects to his ‘Touchsense’ technology, “A whole side what to this can do is what you would call the perpetual 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 performance. In the real world you have a sense of touch not just to understand your surroundings but to manipulate them”.
So with technology able to add touch to a desktop, visually impaired people are enable to negotiate Windows and the web. And when you can convey properties like contours, springs and weight, not only can everyone can have their online shopping enhanced, but those least able to go out to shop stand to gain. “This is the technology path that will ultimately make the Internet accessible to them”, adds Rosenberg.
On the performance side, the technology helps all of us. Putting the cursor on an icon, a hyperlink, or the thin edge of a window, is what Rosenberg calls targeting. “In the real world targeting – say, when you pick up a glass of water is not a visual task but a physical task. In your computer you try to grab at the edge of a window, and you are forced to make it a visual task. As a result your performance is impaired”.
Using the feedback mouse, your hand and cursor physically line up to the window edge. A simple test – hitting map targets on their web site, shows how performance is improved: we were 80% faster hitting a target when we could feel the cursor. For older folk, those with hand tremor – who find it hard to use the mouse – the improvement is dramatic.
Immersion hold patents on touch-enabled hardware and software and since 1993 have incorporated electro-mechanical devices that translate physical sensations into computers. They introduced TouchSense technology to joysticks and gamepads and licensed it to Microsoft and Logitech. Their work with ‘touch-enabled devices has led to a mouse showing map contours, NASA flight simulations and medical surgery simulations.
So that anyone can build the sense of touch into web sites there’s now a free TouchSense SDK. Web developers can use some these easy tools to make a texture sensation say, and associate it like a sound file, to action on screen. They can also draw on a library of sensation files, the equivalent of clip art, and add them to the noise of a laser gun. Online shops, or in-store consoles can add back the physical realism that computers still lack.
And there’s a confident inevitability that it could even catch on as Logitech’s Jean-Francois Genoud reminds, “It is like the way that visual graphics came in, whereas before the computer just had text on it and nothing graphic. We went from eight-bit colour to millions of colours, and now we don’t even discuss the levels of colour. It took some time to get there but the change made common sense for everybody”.
Logitech’s Wingman Force feedback mouse, with games and a ‘feel-it’ Windows desktop sells for $99 / £80
Contacts:
Logitech www.logitech.com
Immersion Corp. www.immersion.com