Immersion’s goal is to change the way people interact with digital devices by engaging their sense of touch. Core competencies include our understanding of how interactions should feel and our knowledge of how to use haptic technology to achieve that feeling.

We have assembled a multidisciplinary team of highly skilled engineers and scientists with the experience required for development of touch-enabling haptic technology. The team’s experience includes skills related to mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, embedded systems and firmware, haptic rendering, software, quality control, haptic content design, and project and process management. Within our medical simulator division, we have assembled a unique team of experts skilled at modeling the anatomy and physiology of various medical cases, creating graphical renderings, designing haptic feedback, and devising advanced haptic control algorithms to simulate realistic navigation and tool and device manipulation within the human body.

We offer our expertise to our customers and licensees to help them design and integrate touch effects into their products. This expertise includes haptic integration kits, turn-key engineering and integration services, authoring tools, haptic application programming interfaces, and development of haptic hardware and software technologies compatible with industry standards.

Haptics Integration Kits

To facilitate the validation and adoption of touch-enabling haptic technology, we have developed various integration kits. These kits include actuators or actuator references, mounting samples, controller boards or schematics, software libraries and source code samples, and documentation. Our application engineers support customer use of these haptic integration kits through phone and e-mail technical support, onsite workshops, or other means.

Turn-key Engineering and Integration Services

We also offer engineering assistance including technical and design assistance and integration services that allow our customers and licensees to incorporate our touch-enabling haptic products and technologies into their products at a reasonable cost and in a shortened time frame. These services allow them to get to market quickly by using our years of haptic development expertise. We offer product development solutions including haptic software libraries, design, prototype creation, technology transfer, component sourcing, development/integration kits, sample source code, comprehensive documentation, and other engineering services. In addition, we ensure a quality end-user experience by offering testing and certification services.

Haptic Authoring Tools

We license haptic authoring tools that enable software developers to quickly design and incorporate custom touch feedback into their own applications. Authoring tools allow designers to create, modify, experience, and save or restore haptic effects for a haptic device. The tools are the equivalent of a computer-aided design application for haptics, and they support vibro-tactile haptic devices (such as mobile phones, touchscreens, and vibro-tactile gaming peripherals), as well as kinesthetic haptic devices (such as rotary devices, joysticks, and medical training systems).

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Our APIs provide haptic-effect generation capability. This allows designers and programmers to focus on adding haptic effects to their applications instead of struggling with the mechanics of programming real-time algorithms and handling communications between computers and devices. Some of our haptic APIs are device independent (for example, they work with scroll wheels, rotary knobs, 2D joysticks, and other devices) to allow flexibility and reusability. Others are crafted to meet the needs of a particular customer or industry.

Compatible with Industry Standards

We have designed our haptic hardware and software technologies to be compatible with industry hardware and software standards. Our technologies operate across multiple platforms and comply with such standards as Microsoft’s DirectX entertainment application programming interface and the standard Universal Serial Bus (USB) communications interface. More generally, our haptic software driver and API technology have been designed to be platform independent and ported to a variety of operating systems including Windows, Windows CE, Mac OS X, BREW/REX (from QUALCOMM), Java (J2SE), and VxWorks.