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New Type Of Force Feedback Prototyped By Academics
Engineers at the University of Utah have prototyped and demonstrated a new haptic (touch) feedback system intended for use on gamepads. The "skin-stretch" technology is hoped to be ready for consumer mass production in time for the next wave of consoles.
Associate professor of mechanical engineering William Provancher is demonstrating the prototype this week at a symposium in Vancouver. "We have developed feedback modes that enhance immersiveness and realism for gaming scenarios such as collision, recoil from a gun, the feeling of being pushed by ocean waves or crawling prone in a first-person shooter game," he says.
With this system, the skin on the pad of a gamer's thumbstick-operating digit is stretched in a direction to give additional feedback. The gamepad can give separate haptic feedback through the nub in the center of each thumbstick.
On the face of it, this new feedback system sounds weird and unintuitive. Many people, myself included, said the same thing when they first heard about the N64 Rumble Pak, twin-stick first-person shooter controls, or most recently the Wii remote and Kinect. Maybe this system is more rumble and less Virtual Boy.
[ScienceBlog via SlashDot]
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