Handheld Usability

Haptics is the technical term for adding the sense of touch to a human-machine interface. In a mobile phone context, the simplest implementation is full-fidelity vibration. Immersion Corporation in San Jose, California, is the world leader in haptics technology. I met with Jeff Eid, VP of Mobility Business Development at Immersion Corporation. He demonstrated Immersion’s latest deployments of touch technology in mobile telephone handsets from Samsung, shipping through ten operators around the globe today, including Orange and T-Mobile in Europe, Verizon, Sprint and Alltel in the US, SKT and KTF in S. Korea, and China Mobile.

According to Eid, “Immersion’s full-fidelity vibration, called VibeTonz, has found its initial application in gaming. With the advent of music handsets, we expect the technology to be used more widely to identify callers through vibration-enhanced ringtones. We see additional applications in mobile user interfaces to enhance things like the use of touch screens and various alerts.”

Touch screens offer no affordances for when buttons are pressed. People touch the screen and don’t feel anything. Haptics is an almost magical solution to that problem, offering force feedback to indicate to the user the button action is initiated. Button size too small? Make it larger. Too much information to fit on two soft keys? Add buttons to the screen.

Gaming: Highway Racer from Pulse Interactive is a fast paced motorcycle game deployed through BREW on Samsung N330 handset from Verizon. When the accelerator (2 digit) is pressed, the driver can feel the acceleration. Similarly, driving off-road feels rougher than driving on the road, and crashing feels like a thundering explosion.

Contact Jeff Eid for information about Immersion’s haptic technology.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Mueller is the Project Director of User Needs Assessment for the Wireless RERC (Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center) in Atlanta, Georgia, a US Department of Education-funded research center endeavoring to work with mobile carriers and handset manufacturers to create products that are usable by people with disabilities: sensory, cognitive, and physical. Sensory disabilities include hearing and sight—and not only complete blindness, but differing levels of sight, which is true for each of the disability classes: some people can’t walk, and others have difficulty walking but can walk with assistance.

Jim is speaking at the Wireless Accessibility Workshop at CTIA on Wednesday 5 April 2006, and he was kind enough to speak to me the night before the workshop about how his group can most effectively support improvements to the wireless user experience for disabled people. I suggested that Jim contact carriers, who are the true customers of the handset manufacturers—mobile phone end users buy from the carriers, after all.

Reader challenge: if you know someone or are yourself involved at a manufacturer or carrier, and have interest in helping people with disabilities, please contact Jim directly. He is seeking contacts who are responsible for handset buying, specification, and marketing. His group is working to put numbers to the buying power of people with disabilities, whom we all agree are under-served.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)