Immersion Demonstrates the Future of Mobile User Experience at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference

Business Wire, May 28, 2009

Immersive Messaging provides a Shared Space, or a place on a mobile phone, designed to help bridge the distance between remote people. Multiple people inhabit a Shared Space and can literally feel one another’s presence with their fingertips. In a form of non-verbal communication, two people can twiddle, or simultaneously draw their fingers across touchscreens -- when their fingers “touch”, they feel each other’s presence through a haptic cue.

Hapticons

One way of communicating in a Shared Space is through hapticons – graphic, animated symbols created and sent using natural gestures such as waving or tilting the phone, or even blowing on the hapticons themselves. Hapticons are central to Immersive Messaging. They are active universal symbols onto which users can place their own personal, context-specific meanings. Among the hapticons demonstrated at the conference were a beating heart to convey affection; a nail to convey affirmation – created by making a hammer motion with the phone; and a champagne glass sent to multiple mobile phones and filled by the sender by simply making a motion as if pouring a bottle of champagne. Recipients on stage could see the glass filling on their devices, hear the pouring of the champagne, and feel the clink of the champagne glasses through tactile vibrations.

Hapticons can carry text or multimedia messages inside them. They are felt through distinct vibrations when created and as they move and bounce around the boundaries of the Shared Space, asserting their presence inside the phone and expressing the motion or status of the sender. For example, if the sender is walking, a hapticon will express this movement to the sender by bouncing within the shared space – a movement that is directly translated to the receiving device based on the motion of the sending device. If the sender is driving, a hapticon will appear to be accelerating or decreasing steadily in one direction.

About TouchSense Technology (www.immersion.com)

Immersion’s TouchSense touch feedback technology more fully involves the sense of touch to make the user experience with digital and medical devices more efficient, intuitive, safer and more accurate. TouchSense solutions for medical device controls, programmable rotary technology, touchscreens, touch panels, touch surfaces, and handheld products incorporate numerous proprietary mechanical, electrical, software, and firmware technologies. Immersion can also assist partners with development and integration, making it faster and easier to realize the many benefits of touch feedback.

About Immersion (www.immersion.com)

Haptic (touch) technology is the future of user experience in digital devices. Founded in 1993, Immersion harnesses human touch to create user experiences that deliver a more compelling sense of the digital world. Using one of Immersion’s adaptable high fidelity haptic systems, partners can achieve a competitive advantage and greater revenue opportunities with products that are more intuitive, satisfying, efficient, and safe. With Immersion technology, world-class companies can deliver improved user experiences in products such as widely popular video games, leading video console gaming systems, advanced automotive driver controls, and award-winning mobile phones. Immersion manufactures its own line of medical simulators that incorporate touch technology. These virtual reality training tools, installed around the world, enable practitioners to improve their practice of sophisticated life-saving surgical procedures prior to operating on patients. With over 700 issued or pending patents in the U.S. and other countries, Immersion is the leading innovator in touch-enabled user experiences that bring the digital universe to life.