Gadgetory

on today's episode of tech quickie we are gonna get a little touchy-feely which no no not like that but we are gonna talk about haptics technologies that create real-time feedback effects with touch rather than relying only on the sounds from a pair of headphones or images on a screen so arcade games going all the way back to the mid-1970s have used force feedback particularly in things like driving games where your steering wheel or your handlebars would shake after you spent another 25 cents on crashing and burning yet again theme parks later took this idea a few steps further with moving theater rides where your seat or even the entire room would shake and vibrate to simulate an adventure through some fantastical land but in the mid-1990s we started to finally see consumer grade haptics like the interactor vest in 1994 an early wearable technology that plugged into your TV and converted certain frequencies of audio into vibrations that you could feel in your chest with the idea being to make sounds like explosions more realistic and immersive of course what you were really doing was strapping a glorified subwoofer to your body but progress is progress three years later in 1997 Nintendo released the rumble pack for its Nintendo 64 controller adding an extra bit of punch to now famous titles like Star Fox and Super Smash Brothers and while the gentle rumbling of the pack in your hand wouldn't truly make you feel like you were in the cockpit of an x-wing having just gotten black stood it was a nice additional feature that enhanced the gaming experience enough that this sort of force feedback is now a standard feature in many modern controllers today though there's far more in the works than just making your game pad shake a bit modern haptic technologies typically take the form of physical actuators that can vibrate in precise ways to mimic textures or provide more precise feedback than earlier solutions the recently released steam controller features track pads that simulate a wide variety of in-game effects such as recoil from a gun and can also fool your fingers into thinking they're using a clicky mouse wheel or a trackball although the actual surface itself is smooth and apple's tactic engine is capable of making your laptop touchpad emulate bumpy or pitted surfaces and downward clicks in addition to the usual force feedback so other types of controllers and input devices we may see in the future could offer so much more even things like resistance effects we're picking up a heavy object in-game can feel heavier to your fingers and we're also starting to explore how haptics can be used to put more reality in virtual reality especially when it comes to haptic devices that can be paired with VR headsets several kinds of prototype haptic gloves have been developed using physical actuators in individual fingers or even selectively inflatable air pockets to give users the sense of touching and moving around a virtual world but lioness does this stuff have any application beyond gaming and showing off my expensive Apple toys to my friends well of course it does designers that work with 3d models will benefit from haptics in a huge way as they'll be able to use haptic gloves to feel an object modeled on-screen or perhaps as an augmented reality hologram right in front of them before it's manufactured and for folks that have been afflicted by blindness haptics may offer a window to the world through devices like tacet which provides force feedback to let patients know what's around them using sonar and speaking of medical applications engineers are also looking at way to provide tactile feedback to physicians that need to perform surgery on faraway patients using a robot arm and remote controller that can mimic the feeling of the patient's body part allowing for much greater precision in situations where a supervising surgeon can't physically be in the operating room I mean just think one day haptic feedback will not only be the way to give yourself carpal tunnel because you can't put down your oculus rift it might be the way your surgeon heals your hand speaking of learning self surgery just kidding they teach lots of things but not that lynda.com where you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching they've got thousands of video courses on demand so you can learn at your own schedule and at your own pace they've got stuff like video editing photography business productivity applications coding so whether you're looking to kick-start your career or just you know engage your brain because exercising your mind is just as important as exercising your body try it out head over to lynda.com they've got all kinds of great features like you can don't have to just watch online anymore you can download it to your phone you can create playlists and share them with your friends so you guys you and your learning group can follow the same path and support each other as you go and your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics all for a flat rate starting at just 25 bucks a month but if you're not sure if Linda's right for you visit lynda.com slash tech quickie and sign up for a free all-you-can-eat 10-day trial just find out hey is this pretty cool yeah maybe it is so thanks for watching guys if you like this video do that thing if you just like to do the other thing leave a comment below with suggestions for future fast as possible we love getting those suggestions from you guys and as always subscribe get subscribed so that you don't miss more of these videos maybe you suggested something and you never subscribed and then you're not even gonna see your suggestion what kind of world would that be