VentureBeat

Imagine this: an iPhone with a keyboard you can actually feel, even though there are no physical keys.

That’s the goal that many mobile phone suppliers including Apple would love to reach. Touch and feel screens in mobile phones are already available, at least from Samsung and LG, but it seems to be difficult to create a technology that works well enough.

Senseg, a Finnish startup, says that E-Sense, the tactile interface technology they have developed, will be the game changer. E-Sense generates the feel of virtual buttons on smooth surfaces like cell phone or computer screens and gives tactile feedback to the user.

The difference between E-Sense and the other haptic, or tactile, technologies, such as Nintendo Wii, or the ones Silicon Valley based Immersion has introduced and reportedly sold licenses to Nokia and Apple for, is that Senseg’s technology is not powered by mechanical motors but is based on virtual touch technology.

“With E-Sense, we don’t need the whole device to vibrate, instead the tactile feedback can appear in certain small areas of the surface,” says Dr. Ville Makinen, the CEO of Senseg, who invented the technology.

The sensations can be located precisely in very small areas of the screen, and increasing the resolution of “tixels” (as Senseg calls the touch elements on a screen), screen makers can enrich tactile feedback.  

According to Senseg, that’s not E-Sense’s only advantage over other haptic technologies. Because E-Sense doesn’t need a vibration motor to create tactile feedback, it has no mechanical parts that can wear out.

The technology can be used in a wide range of surfaces because it is embedded into a thin, flexible film that can be added to almost any kind of surface, even vowen into clothing materials.  

E-Sense can be used, for example, with the GPS navigation system in your car. When driving, the tactile cues in the screen guide your fingers to touch the right buttons without looking at the screen.

Or imagine playing a video game such as Super Mario Brothers. When you give a boost to Mario, you can feel the boost in your hand as a rapid movement that would be produced by Senseg’s E-Sense Module in the game controller. And as the boost gets weaker, the pace of E-Sense decreases, then disappears.

One more example of the technology: When using Microsoft Surface, an electronic touch screen table PC, with Senseg’s E-Sense Module, you can get tactile feedback when clicking an item. When dragging a file, low level vibration guides the finger through the screen.

This sounds like it’s from a science fiction movie, and it’s hard to believe without seeing, especially when the company compares its technology to a kind of artificially created sixth sense.

Makinen says E-Sense also enables Touch over IP. Just as Voice over IP can transfer voice via the Internet, Touch over IP is supposed to transfer the sense of touch.

“In the future, your sweetheart can draw a heart to you, anywhere in the world he or she might be, and you can feel the heart in the mousepad-like thing attached to your USB-port,” Makinen says.

Senseg’s technology has several patents pending, and the company was recently funded by Ambient Sound Investments, an Estonian investment group run by four engineers who were behind the development of Skype’s technology, and Seed Fund Vera, a Finnish seed fund. The amount of investment hasn’t been revealed.

Senseg is going to sell its technology in a combination of a hardware and software platforms embedded with several software elements providing content. The technology will be available for a select group of manufacturers in the second half of 2008, and the first products with the technology should be launched early next year.

Jonathan Christensen opened the eComm (emerging communications) conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., with the prediction that free Internet calling will make its way to mobile handsets and complete the revolution that began with computer calling.

“To me, this is the most interesting time for us,” said Christensen, general manager of audio and video at eBay’s Skype division. “The phone is dead.”
He didn’t, however, give an exact time for the death of the cell phone as we know it. What he calls the “mobile mess” stands in the way. That includes the problems related to the scarcity of wireless spectrum, which enables the creation of walled gardens, closed networks, and how wireless carriers lock consumers into their own phones. That’s going to change with mobile VOIP, he said.

Christensen walked through the evolution of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) and how it evolved into the runaway success of Skype, the free communications service that now has 276 million users. About 30 million registered users signed up in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Now incumbent phone companies are coming in to offer the same service and features, which serves only to accelerate the shift away from landlines, he said. Even Christensen’s own mother has gotten rid of her landline and is now relying on a mobile phone.

“This is another foot in the grave,” he said. “A new game is afoot.”

Not for his mom. For phones as we know them. Now Skype is rolling out into a variety of cordless phones, the Sony PlayStation Portable handheld gaming system, the Nokia N800 Internet tablet and a lot of other devices. And Skype itself is profitable, he said.

“We’ve entered the ear of rich PC-based Internet communications,” he said. “We have real-time video, data presence, text, wide-band audio, smart endpoints, an open platform and application innovation.”

But to make the conquest complete, VOIP has to open up the cell phone networks. Christensen said that he couldn’t disclose ongoing Skype projects on this front but he is excited about what’s coming. He noted that eBay’s priorities are focused more on enabling Skype to grow than to integrate Skype with eBay’s own services.

He believes that flat-rate pricing, the auction of the 700 megahertz wireless spectrum, and other events are opening up the mobile platform. It will be interesting to see how long it all takes to deliver us to the promised land. I’ll publish more in the next couple of days from the conference.