The makers of Nintendo Switch’s HD Rumble talk haptic feedback in gaming and beyond

New Spaces for Haptics

If ERM motors were the past of haptics, LRAs are the future – or at least part of it.

“The last few generations of consoles have been pretty stagnant in terms of their evolution of haptic capabilities,” Ullrich told me. They’re good for ambient effects, Ullrich said.

“You want to create an explosion, a sense of road texture,” Ullrich offered – the motors inside PlayStation and Xbox controllers are great at that. But, Ullrich said, “there’s… an upper limit on what you can do with rumble technology.”

Chris Ullrich, Vice President of User Experience and Analytics at Immersion

Now, though, higher-fidelity actuators are working their way into other gaming tech, and this puts a common link between the Nintendo Switch and the burgeoning world of VR that, personally, I hadn’t thought of.

While Sony and Microsoft are still working with those boomerang-style controllers, Nintendo and the teams behind the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are breaking controllers out into two separate pieces meant to be held with one in each hand. That change, coupled with the introduction of LRA motors, is introducing room for all sorts of ideas to enhance games with haptics.

“Within VR,” Tullis said, “it’s super understood that haptics is an important part of the experience.”

One suggestion both Tullis and Ullrich went to was a bow and arrow, a favorite weapon of game designers and green-clad superheroes. With two completely discrete devices delivering haptic feedback, you can communicate two wildly different sensations. In one hand, you have the bow itself – a heavier device that will offer some duller sensations. In the other, you have the bowstring, which can vibrate differently as you pull the string further back and increase the tension on the line. The idea of driving and shooting at the same time came up, too, because who doesn’t want to live out a Jason Statham movie?

It doesn’t have to be all murder weapons, though.

“Let’s say you’re playing Job Simulator,” Ullrich said. “You’re manipulating two things that look exactly the same but have different masses. You can know whether one weighs more, whether one is more sticky.” Ullrich, who comes from a background of in simulation-related haptics, also mentioned virtual surgical training, where making surgeons feel like they’re interacting with tissues helps make the virtual training more immersive and more effective.

In a driving game, Ullrich says haptic effects can be detailed enough to tell the difference between concrete and asphalt, cracked roadways, and even grooved roads. Tullis made sure to call out the Impulse Triggers in the Xbox One controller as a way Microsoft has tried to add additional value to controller rumble, and indeed it’s something I look forward to whenever I play Forza Motorsport.

In those cases, the haptic feedback is actually delivering additional world information on top of providing some aesthetic value. The person playing knows better how to play the game than they would without the feedback.

And before we can even get into a game, we have to navigate menus to get there. Haptics help with that, too. We see it constantly with mobile phones, like with the iPhone’s 3D touch, but it comes into VR as well. The VR art application Tiltbrush, for example, puts the menus around your wrists. Good haptic feedback is key to helping users navigate virtual menus that not only have no physical counterpart but have the further disconnect of being navigated by real hands in virtual space.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/03/13/immersion-haptic-feedback-vibration-feature-touchsense-force/