The Next Big Sensation?

Good Vibrations

Pricey niche products were the first to offer touch feedback -- high-end Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, medical devices, the Wii controller and some casino and bar-top games. But now more than 35 million touch-feedback cellphones have shipped. Most of them far exceed in sophistication the mechanical spring-loaded screen of the BlackBerry. One, from Samsung, can transmit a reasonable semblance of a beating heart. That's why it's time to start envisioning what our world will be like when every smart object routinely interacts with the brain this novel way.

The game world has shown how touch can be integrated with vision and hearing. When you "hit" a tennis ball with a Wii controller, not only are your eyes on the screen, but when you "connect" with the virtual ball, triggering the vibration that fires your touch nerves, the device sounds a resounding thwack. Arguably, it's the sound that really has you thinking you've hit a tennis ball, not a baseball. But, as in life, it's the combination of senses that your brain processes.

"So how do we move from wow and games and the fun part into practical business tools that you can't live without?" asks Chuck Joseph, general manager of the touch interface products group at Immersion. He's been through this sort of thing before, helping transform global positioning from something only the military had into so much a part of our lives that "now kids have it in their shoes."

He remembers getting the attention of the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company by taking a sophisticated surveying tool and making it something you could understand without looking at it. "It has touch-screen, but when the surveyor is walking around looking at that screen and trying to touch it, he's tripping, he's falling, he's got a backpack on, he's got an antenna at the end of the pole." So Joseph's crew transformed it into something like a touch Geiger counter. The closer the target, the stronger the vibration.

Warm, warm, warmer, warmer, hot, hot, hot.

"Imagine that coming into your friend-finder," Schaeffer says. "Teenagers at the mall. Or you're trying to figure out where you're going and sometimes you can't hear on a busy street corner. So your GPS can have that feeling to turn left or right, or keep coming.

"As a mom, you can have messaging and alerts that feel different. I'll know it's my son, even if I have my sound off. And I'll know what priority it is. If this is an SOS, I would walk out of this meeting to take the call. It could feel like whatever we wanted to make it feel like -- a heartbeat."

A Kiss Is Still a Kiss

Immersion employs people called "haptic artists" who build touch effects. "It's just like composing music or painting a picture. It's the creation of feeling," says Schaeffer.

Can you transmit a kiss?

"We can transmit a slap," she says. "That's one of my favorites, for when you get 'I'm coming home late.' "

What about sex?

Very long pause.