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hen the Mars Rover picks
up a rock, NASA scientists wait several minutes before seeing the red chunk
through their video eye. When a satellite repair robot tightens a screw,
Houston waits ten anxious seconds before knowing if they've stripped the
darn thing. Pondering such sensory time delays got Louis Rosenberg started on the road from aerospace researcher to entrepreneur. As a Stanford graduate student, Rosenberg invented both computer-based ("virtual") and physical ("telepresence") simulations of remote space environments to bridge exactly these kinds of sensory gaps.
As he developed these fake environments, Rosenberg decided to focus on the less-studied and more ME-amenable problem of "feel" rather than vision. He also chose an advisor who worked with individuals whose sensory gaps were less ethereal. Professor Larry Liefer specialized in bioengineering rehabilitative tools for people with hearing loss or motor disabilities. This association with Liefer led Rosenberg even deeper into the connections between human perception and touch.
"I was trying to understand conceptually how people decompose tactile feeling,"
he says. "How do they sense a hard surface. Crispness? Sponginess?" With
extensive coursework in psychology, Rosenberg was unusually well-equipped
to undertake this delicate parsing of the human sense of touch. He found the perfect laboratory for exploring these fundamental questions in a nearby NASA Ames flight simulator that sported a one-of-a-kind, sensation-generating joystick.
"People would spend an hour playing with this force feedback joystick at NASA," recalls Rosenberg, "and at the end of the test flight almost everyone would tell us that this was really cool and they wished they had this at home. Obviously they were joking. The simulator was the size of a dishwasher, and it cost $100,000. But this was the 'Ah-hah.' This was the motivation to say 'Why don't we make this a mass market product?'"
In jumping from insight to product, Rosenberg was, once again, an unusually well-equipped engineer. His projects within the ME department's Center for Design Research had taught him how to create competitive, high-tech, product-development strategies. His entrepreneurial reflexes were honed.
However, making a $100,000 device into a $99 device requires more than business pluck. It also requires technical acumen.
"Generating feel sensations is a computationally intensive thing," says Rosenberg. "It takes a lot of computing power to simulate texture, surfaces, springs. One of our big innovations was putting the brains for feel on the device itself rather than on the PC."
Rosenberg founded the Immersion Corporation in 1993 to take advantage of his breakthrough. The first products employing his force feedback technology are computer games with joysticks or steering wheels that vibrate, jolt, slip, shimmy, or jump in synch with video displays of tached-out Indy cars and hard-banking fighter jets. The San Jose company of 50, most of them Stanford graduates, provides software to game developers and sells the "I-Force" microprocessor to hardware-peripheral manufacturers.
"Other companies make sound chips and audio chips," he explains. "We make a feel chip."
Although the gaming market has provided the initial boost for Immersion, Rosenberg envisions much larger markets. His first attempt to reach the computing mainstream is the FEELit Mouse, a PC interface that swaps electro-magnetic impulses between mouse and pad to allow users to "feel" icons, scroll bars, and table grids as holes, valleys, or bumps. The Immersion mouse makes it surprisingly easy to create, find, click on, and move objects, thus speeding up simple tasks like positioning a cursor.
But this unique mouse also allows PC users to explore novel, on-screen sensations such as textures, surfaces, springs, liquids, and vibrations. As developers build more FEELit features into products, Immersion technology may eventually play a role in Website e-commerce — allowing customers to kick the tires and feel the upholstery before buying — as well as in medical imaging, computer-aided design, and tools for disabled persons.
"Vision and sound alone do not convey all the information a person needs to understand his environment," says Rosenberg. "Feel is an important information channel."
Once again, a Stanford engineer reinvents the computer. This time with feeling.
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