AllThingsD » Immersion

Tablets That Have a Certain Feel to Them

Ina Fried — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:13:48 +0000

Given that most Android tablets look the same, a couple of companies are showing technologies in Barcelona that make sure they don’t feel the same.

One of those companies is a Finnish start-up called Senseg. Its technology, which it says is just now ready to go into products, lets you rub your hand over a flat glass tablet screen and feel texture that is eerily like a real world object. Touch a picture of kitchen tiles, for example and it feels smooth until the bump where the grout is.

A different approach is offered up by Immersion, a longtime player in this field, which is showing off a new generation of electronics that open the door to far more realistic sensations than the current vibrations or simple touch feedback from a virtual keyboard.

Haptics — or the technology that enables adding a sense of feel to electronics — has been around for a while. Immersion, for example, demoed how a phone or tablet could gain a better sense of feel back at our D7 conference in 2009.

Early devices just rumbled or vibrated at certain times. Touch feedback has already made its way in more limited uses, with the most common being virtual keyboards that offer a physical sensation when a key is pressed.

But the field has continued to evolve. Some of the technology just on the horizon reproduces the way things feel much more authentically.

At its booth this year, Immersion was showing a phone with digital maracas that feel like you’re actually rattling rice. Then there’s the roller coaster video that gives you both the click-click-click as you climb and the “whoosh” as the descent begins. Yet another demo app adds to any music playback a bass track you can feel.

Both Immersion and Senseg also demonstrated haptics used another way — as a physical cue to something in a long list of data. Imagine, for example, scrolling though email and feeling a physical bump when you get to a message from your spouse or boss.

Similarly, varying amounts of touch feedback can be used to indicate the popularity or rank of something. Immersion had a demo app, for example, where users could flip through a set of images and feel increased touch sensation when they scrolled to a photo with lots of comments.

The technologies from Immersion and Senseg have some similarities, but work in different ways. Immersion’s technology uses a rectangular bar-like component called a piezo module, that physically vibrates the device in varying locations and frequencies. Senseg, meanwhile, uses the combination of a custom chip and a special screen coating to create an electric field on the front of the display.

Senseg’s approach requires developers to explicitly write their software to use the technology, meaning it could be most attractive to device makers that want to add a feel to their user interface skin. Immersion, meanwhile, has programming interfaces that developers can use, but also has a mechanism to add haptic feedback even to apps that were not designed for it.

The two technologies are also at different stages. Senseg is just now looking to sign its first customers, while Immersion says its newer technology is already in a tablet from Pantech and will come soon to other tablets. Phones should also get the new touch tech, once the piezo modules are reduced a bit in size.

[ See post to watch video ]

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Lost in Immersion: Speaking French on the Web

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:00:52 +0000

The home page of Totale shows your learning progress and options for playing language games by yourself or with other students.

If you’ve ever learned a foreign language, you know the vast difference between completing workbook activities and speaking with others. The latter experience can involve sounding out unfamiliar accents or guttural pronunciations and, though intimidating, is ultimately more rewarding. By immersing yourself in a language and navigating through situations, you learn how to speak and eventually think in that language.

Rosetta Stone (RST) has long used visual learning without translations by pairing words with images—one of the ways a baby learns to speak. For the past week, I’ve been testing its newest offering: Rosetta Stone Totale (pronounced toe-tall-A), which is the company’s first fully Web-based language-learning program. It aims to immerse you in a language using three parts: online coursework that can take up to 150 hours; live sessions in which you can converse over the Web with a native-speaking coach and other students; and access to Rosetta World, a Web-based community where you can play language games by yourself or with other students to improve your skills.

[ See post to watch video ]

Totale costs a whopping $999, so if you aren’t serious about learning a language it’s a tough sell. Rosetta Stone says this program is comparable to an in-country language-immersion school. The company’s most expensive offering before Totale was a set of CDs (lessons one, two and three) that cost $549, included about 120 hours of course work and had no online components.

The Totale Package

Since Totale is Web-based it doesn’t come loaded onto several disks in a yellow box like the company’s previous products. But despite this digital transition, buyers of Totale will still receive Rosetta’s familiar yellow box, now filled with a USB headset and supplemental audio discs for practicing away from the PC—mostly while in the car.

I’ve spent over eight hours learning French in Totale throughout the past week, and I have to say that I’m surprised by how much I feel I’ve already learned. I realized this when I spent a 30-minute car ride listening to one of the supplemental audio CDs. I mentally identified and translated practically every vocabulary word and phrase, and I repeated the words aloud with what I thought sounded like a pretty decent French accent. This was after just four hours of work online.

Totale users can speak with a coach and three others in studio sessions.

Intensive Coursework

The core of Totale is the time-intensive online coursework. But even though this takes a lot of effort, its layout is attractive and each screen has only a few things on it so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Lessons include identifying photos of objects or situations as they are described aloud, writing phrases (my least favorite part), and using deductive reasoning to construct and dictate your own sentences about a photo. Totale’s headset comes in handy during exercises that require you to repeat words or sounds out loud into the microphone.

Activities in Rosetta World—including solo, two-person and group games—were addictively fun. One game plays like Bingo: I listened to someone speaking French and marked words on the board as I heard them, racing to get five words horizontally, vertically or diagonally before my opponent beat me to it. I waded into these games cautiously at first, playing alone before I got familiar enough to challenge another Totale user.

Helpful indicators show how many people are available at any given time for each type of game in Rosetta World—meaning that person is logged into Totale and studying the same language as you. I never saw more than five people in the community, and it gets a little old playing (or worse, losing) to the same person after a while. Since Totale was only recently released, this community should grow over time.

A chat window at the bottom left of the browser window reminded me of Facebook’s built-in instant-messaging program, listing users against whom I competed in online games. But unlike when I’m on Facebook, I didn’t feel comfortable instant messaging with these people.

No Flashcards

Rosetta Stone’s methods, while natural and easy to pick up, aren’t what my brain expects when learning a different language. I minored in Spanish in college, learning in traditional classroom style by studying verb conjugations on flashcards and vocabulary definitions in English. So at certain times throughout Totale’s French-only lessons, a part of me wanted to know the exact definition of a phrase or the reasoning behind why something was the way it was.

The moment of truth came when I attended a real-time, 50-minute studio session online with one of the live coaches—all of whom are native speakers—and two other students (four students is the maximum allowed per class).

Rosetta Stone recommends that students complete an entire unit before joining one of these studio sessions, and the only language you are permitted to speak during the studio is the one being studied. I proudly remembered all of my new vocabulary words as our coach pointed the cursor to animals, colors and clothing, asking us questions and prompting us to ask one another questions. The coach kindly corrected us when we made mistakes, made jokes about words and used an on-screen tool to type out a few of the harder phrases.

But I fumbled around trying to remember the correct phrases and grammar to go along with my vocabulary.

I frustratingly realized that I didn’t even know how to ask my coach in French, “Why is that blanc and not blanche?” Our coach eventually answered that question and some others without anyone’s prompting because it was obvious that none of us knew what forms of some words were right or why; Totale’s coursework doesn’t include explanations. A few of the phrases our coach explained still puzzled me and I was starting to miss my flashcards from Spanish class.

Team Effort

Rosetta Stone is determined to make sure you don’t feel like you’re alone as you work through the Totale program. A “Customer Success Team” representative calls you within a day of your product purchase to answer any questions or concerns about how everything works. And this team keeps calling or emailing (you tell them which contact method you prefer) whenever you have passed a milestone in the program—or to encourage you to pick it up again if you haven’t logged on in a while.

Even for $999, you can go back in and re-use every feature in Totale, but only for one year. You can reset your scores and completely start over, attending online studios again and playing games in Rosetta World as many times as you like. But once a year is up, you’re finished with the program.

Rosetta Stone Totale works on all major Mac and Windows PC browsers, though participating in a studio session while using some browsers requires you turn off their pop-up blockers.

I still have work to do in Totale, but I’m looking forward to it—even though I find some aspects to be a bit vague. This program does a terrific job of immersing you in a language and may be the next best thing to living in a country, surrounded by native speakers. Best of all, unlike my semester abroad in Spain where college friends gave me my daily fix of the English language, Totale never lets you slip out of using the language you’re studying.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at
mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

Immersion: The Full D7 Demo

Kara Swisher — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:20:09 +0000

Immersion (IMMR) is the innovative company behind haptic, or touch feedback, technology for some videogame consoles and mobile phones.

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Immersion demoed its TouchSense for touchscreen keyboards and Immersive Messaging.

With TouchSense, the user is not only supposed to be able to get haptic feedback, but can also feel the virtual keys.

Immersive Messaging will also use haptic feedback, as well as gesture recognition, to send messages that employ physical senses rather than text.

See Walt Mossberg and the Immersion guys trade digital hearts. No, really, they did.

Also, I “twiddled.” Don’t ask.

Here’s the video of the full D7 demo:

[ See post to watch video ]

Immersion: The Full D7 Demo

Kara Swisher — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:18:03 +0000

Immersion (IMMR) is the innovative company behind haptic, or touch feedback, technology for some videogame consoles and mobile phones.

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Immersion demoed its TouchSense for touchscreen keyboards and Immersive Messaging.

With TouchSense, the user is not only supposed to be able to get haptic feedback, but can also feel the virtual keys.

Immersive Messaging will also use haptic feedback, as well as gesture recognition, to send messages that employ physical senses rather than text.

See Walt Mossberg and the Immersion guys trade digital hearts. No, really, they did.

Also, I “twiddled.” Don’t ask.

Here’s the video of the full D7 demo:

[ See post to watch video ]

D7 Tech Demo: Immersion

Oliver J. Chiang — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:15:19 +0000

Immersion (IMMR) is the company behind haptic, or touch feedback, technology for some videogame consoles and cellphones. At D7, the company will reveal two of its newest technologies: TouchSense for touchscreen keyboards and Immersive Messaging. With TouchSense, the user is not only supposed to be able to get haptic feedback, but can also feel the virtual keys. Immersive Messaging will also use haptic feedback, as well as gesture recognition, to send messages that employ physical senses rather than text.

Session Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Walt and Kara welcome Immersion CTO Christophe Ramstein to the stage. Rock music plays.
Christophe: I am here to unveil two new things: Immersive Message and TouchSense Keyboards. Walt: So it makes an iPhone virtual keyboard feel like a mechanical keyboard. Christophe: Bingo.
Everything here is new, shiny, and of course, available for productization.
Cue infomercial: Ever feel like virtual typing is difficult? Now there’s TouchSense! Christophe types on the virtual keyboard and we hear the keyboard sounds. Pretty realistic. Kara tries it too. Christophe: What do you feel? Kara: Funny. I feel like it’s going to shock me.
Walt: This is very cool, but what’s the advantage? Can I not look at my keyboard now. Christophe: It’s about transitioning between keys, and yes, without looking. Sounds alone don’t do the trick. We can do other things with our haptic feedback and kinesthetics too.

Walt: Do Olli-Pekka and the Palm (PALM) guys know about this? Christophe: [says some stuff]. Walt: But you didn’t answer my question. Christophe: I understand that. [conference takes a beat, then moves on.] This was paraphrased, of course.
Immersive Messaging: You can get physical sense-feedback through messaging. We also have “hapticons.” Hapti-huh? Kara: It sounds like what Kirk fought in the last Star Trek. Walt: Those were the Romulans.–Only at D7. I think it sounds like the Decepticon’s kid brother.
Christophe demonstrates a hapticon heart on his phone. He now tells us to use our imaginations….Pretend you (Walt and Kara) are on a trip, and you are lovers. You can create a heart and it can even beat.
Christophe blows onto his screen, and was able to send the heart over. He says, you can send these heart hapticons over the Internet. Kara: So it’s not like some creepy guy on the plane will send you one. Christophe: Touch the heart I sent you. What do you feel? Kara: It’s beating.
Now Christophe’s using a hammering gesture, tapping on his phone. Walt feels these taps on the receiving end. Kara: He keeps nailing us. Walt: Not what I expected.
The CTO starts to wax and wane: There are infinite possibilities. Walt: Actually there aren’t infinite possibilities in this limited-time demo.
Now onto twiddling. It sounds a bit racy. Kara is intrigued (euphemism). Twiddling is that special time after I get off work, beer in hand, Christophe begins. Immersion may want to rethink that selling point.

Twiddling turns out to be a way that two people can simultaneously touch their own phone’s touchscreens and virtually feel each other, again through haptic feedback.
Christophe shows off the ability to say “cheers” to a friend with a champagne sound/feel of bubbles and clinking.
Walt: Will this be an iPhone app? Christophe: I could tell you, but then I’d have to keeeeel you. Walt and Kara: Fair enough. Off with you now! You’ve been a good sport.

Apple R&D: The "R" Stands for Rumor

John Paczkowski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:17:57 +0000

One of the investments we make is to introduce new products that initially cost more because they deliver an entirely new level of value to the customer. Then we ride the cost curves down with value engineering and volume manufacturing, leaving us far head of our competitors. We have some of these types of investments in front of us that I can’t discuss.”

– Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, July 21, 2008

The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And as with every Apple (AAPL) product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds:

Apple will uncrate a new line of MacBooks whose cases are carved from a single brick of aircraft-grade aluminum.
Apple’s refreshed MacBook line will include a machine priced at below $1000, perhaps even as low as $800.
The new MacBooks will feature glass, multi-touch trackpads and LED-backlit displays.
They’ll swap out Intel’s chipset–not the central processor–for Nvidia’s MCP7A, which reportedly blows the doors off Intel’s G45 in the graphics department.
Blu-ray will be offered as an option on high-end models.
Finally, Apple’s new line of portables will include the unmatchable “state-of-the-art new product” to which Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook referred earlier this year, and that product will be a tablet. Something along the lines of the “MacBook Touch” described by MacDailyNews back in July.

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like but fuller-featured multi-touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. … App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too.”

An interesting spread of rumors, some quite likely, others improbable … and yet entirely plausible because, after all, it’s Apple we’re talking about. We’ll find out which of these proves true tomorrow at 10 a.m. PDT. I’ll be covering the event live, so be sure pay us a visit tomorrow.

Apple R&D: The "R" Stands for Rumor

John Paczkowski — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:17:57 +0000

One of the investments we make is to introduce new products that initially cost more because they deliver an entirely new level of value to the customer. Then we ride the cost curves down with value engineering and volume manufacturing, leaving us far head of our competitors. We have some of these types of investments in front of us that I can’t discuss.”

– Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, July 21, 2008

Apple will uncrate a new line of MacBooks whose cases are carved from a single brick of aircraft-grade aluminum.
Apple’s refreshed MacBook line will include a machine priced at below $1000, perhaps even as low as $800.
The new MacBooks will feature glass, multi-touch trackpads and LED-backlit displays.
They’ll swap out Intel’s chipset–not the central processor–for Nvidia’s MCP7A, which reportedly blows the doors off Intel’s G45 in the graphics department.
Blu-ray will be offered as an option on high-end models.
Finally, Apple’s new line of portables will include the unmatchable “state-of-the-art new product” to which Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook referred earlier this year, and that product will be a tablet. Something along the lines of the “MacBook Touch” described by MacDailyNews back in July.

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like but fuller-featured multi-touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. … App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too.”