Or maybe even your keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft Research is always working on cool new features, and based on a video Microsoft just released, it seems clear that the next version of Kinect will be able to better recognize hands, hand positioning, and hand gestures, effectively letting you control your Xbox — and your PC — with just the equipment god gave you, right out of the box.

Here’s the demo video:

The company has a long ways to go, however, to catch up to Leap Motion.

Leap Motion is essentially a $80 Kinect for your computer, which is 200 times more sensitive than the current Xbox 360′s motion-sensing camera. You can use it to control virtually anything you might want to on your computers, and Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise. It tracks both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second, detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

We have no idea that the prototype Xbox controller is that precise: The video does not show individual finger control, and the screen shows 30 frames per second. (Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have greater capability — Microsoft is certainly keeping some secrets.) But the Xbox is designed as a living room system, so it will likely have a much wider field of sensitivity and a much greater capability to recognize multiple people and multiple hands.

And note that the video says this is Kinect for Windows. Right now, that’s aimed at commercial markets such as in-store demoing solutions. But that’s just a tiny little sideways shuffle from being available for the PC in your kitchen, which you could then control from anywhere, no matter if your hands are full, or clean.

Really, the video hints at the future: Controllers for everything, in the air, hardware-free.

That’s amazing, and it’s no longer science fiction or a Tom Cruise movie.

Hat tip: Engadget

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Touch feedback makes a user interface better by providing confirmation, enabling a sense of realism, and creating richer communication.

That’s the view of Immersion, the maker of haptics, or electronics that deliver touch feedback — such as a vibration or the sense of a button being pushed — through touchscreens and other devices. Today, it is launching a way to get more touch-feedback technology into more devices, mainly by designing user interface experiences that device makers can easily adopt.

The company has shipped more than 550 million TouchSense products.

Founded in 1993, Immersion always has a tough sell because its touch technology adds cost to a system, and you can’t always describe why it makes the experience of using a device better.

But the San Jose, Calif.-based company argues that mobile communications devices can feel lifeless, isolated, and detached if they don’t offer feedback to the user.

“Everyone is familiar with the idea of telepresence, the notion that while we’re talking on a phone, we create a shared audio space with others. With Tactile Presence, we have extended the idea of a shared space to include the sense of touch,” said Immersion’s Chris Ullrich, vice president of user experience. “The sense of touch is fundamental, emotive, and creates a strong sense of connection. With Tactile Presence, OEMs [original equipment manufacturers, or gadget makers] can harness this powerful sense to create more satisfying mobile telepresence experiences.”

The company will be demonstrating its new Tactile Presence and Integrated Themes solutions at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, next week.

Immersion still hasn’t sold Apple on the idea, but the Android operating system from Google has supported haptics since the 2.1 version of the software.

A wide range of devices use them. The Samsung Galaxy S III, the Samsung Note 2, and the Samsung Note 10.1 use haptics. So does the LG Optimus 4. NEC, Fujitsu, and Panasonic have also adopted haptics.

Game makers such as Rockstar Games, Sega, Gamevil, and Handy Games have tapped touch feedback. Several car makers have used haptics in instrument controls. And game peripheral makers such as Razer have also adopted Immersion’s technology.

When it comes to confirmation, Immersion says getting feedback in your finger improves your confidence that you have performed an action such as pushed a button. It also improves accuracy, usability, and intuitive interaction.

Realism is another important result of haptics. A button feels like a button when you push it. It creates the illusion of physical reality in a device that is trying to deliver an illusion to you for the sake of entertainment. And once you interact with haptics, you can recall the effects from the memory of the touch feedback alone, Immersion argues.

Immersion believes that brand messages can be delivered through touch. Intel’s famous computer sounds became familiar to people from its commercials. But the same kind of brand recognition could be delivered through the unique feel of an object as well. Brand makers will be able to tap this technology starting in the second quarter, Immersion said.

In a design style dubbed skeuomorphic, Immersion says that product designers at Samsung created a water-like effect using sounds of droplets and visuals of those droplets hitting the water. You can enhance that feeling by adding a sense of touch to the feel of the drops as they splash in the water. Customers who tested the effect said they could “feel the water” even though they weren’t touching real water.

And when it comes to rich communications — like communicating one lover’s touch to another through a phone — haptics can work wonders. You could, for instance, create an app where you can tap on the phone and the person on the other side of the phone call could feel the vibrations on the phone. Immersion calls these effects “touch trails.” This kind of “tactile presence” technology will be available to gadget makers in the second half of 2013.

To make it easier for developers, Immersion provides an applications programming interface (API) to implement the effects in smartphones or tablets.

Over time, Immersion’s technology has gotten less expensive. And the company says that haptics effects consume only about 2 percent of a smartphone’s processing power, as long as the device uses Immersion’s TouchSense embedded software. Without that software, the haptics use about 7 percent of the processing power.

Haptic feedback, which sends touch pulses into your  fingertips, has been heavily used in game controllers. But now a division of Germany’s Bayer has developed a touch-feedback technology that can enhance the way you hear things as well. And Able Planet, a maker of headphones and other devices, is one of the first companies to show off the new technology.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, Able Planet will show next-generation audio headphones, communications devices, and hearing aids that make use of Bayer’s ViviTouch electroactive polymer technology, which consists of an actuator, or tiny motor, on a thin plastic film. When attached to a solid mass, the film can make a device vibrate as electricity courses through it. In the case of audio, it can deliver a deeper feel for bass sounds. It makes a headphone vibrate as if it had the benefit of a subwoofer.

Able Planet and Bayer MaterialScience’s Artificial Muscle division will jointly design and manufacture new devices that marry the two technologies in products with better sound quality, clarity, and speech intelligibility. They want to overcome problems in reproducing live sound, where fuller sounds can mask high tones and make speech and music sound muddled.

The film is form-fitted onto an audio device, creating a wide area of surface contact with the skin or the inside of the ear canal. The film moves when it receives a current.

“The pairing of Bayer and Able Planet technologies is expected to create the next generation of audio and communication products in some of the world’s most rapidly growing consumer electronics markets,” said Dirk Schapeler, CEO of Artificial Muscle, in a statement.

Able Planet has made audio and communication devices for the past seven years, with applications in both headphones and hearing aids.

Artificial Muscle is a partner with Immersion, a pioneering haptics firm that has a lot of patents in the fundamental technology behind touch feedback. The advantage of the film is that it consumes 70 percent less energy than a typical motor; it also moves a lot faster. By the time you get a touch effect from a typical motor, the image associated with it may be gone from a screen. But the Artificial Muscle actuator can respond within 5 milliseconds.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Artificial Muscle was founded in 2004 as a spinoff from the famous Silicon Valley research lab SRI. It was acquired by Bayer Material Science in Germany.

Ever since the iPhone came along in 2007, touchscreens have ruled electronic gadgets. Haptics, or touch feedback, hasn’t done as well. Will a new generation of better touch-feedback technologies take the touch revolution to the next level?

Christophe Ramstein, the chief executive of haptics startup Strategic Polymers, believes it will happen. He showed off a force-feedback module, dubbed an actuator (a tiny vibration motor) that was made out of bendable plastic and was the thinnest in the world today. Ramstein wants these little modules to be built into all kinds of gadgets so they can become easier to use, and he is one of a number of folks in a growing haptics industry who is encouraged about the coming era of force feedback.

“Existing technologies won’t make it,” Ramstein (pictured left) said in a talk at the Emerging Displays conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday. “We need a revolution. We need breakthrough technology.”

The lack of tactile feedback in most of today’s smartphones and tablets is a problem. Devices with physical keyboards have tiny keys that are too small for a lot of people to accurately hit them. Typing mistakes are hard to correct and they’re frustrating. You can often only use one finger at a time.

With haptics, the newest devices are bendable and hard to break. They can improve accuracy of touch by confirming that you have hit the right spot on a screen, Ramstein said. And they can produce both sound and vibrations. Haptic feedback gives you realism, confirmation, and rich communication. Besides Strategic Polymers, haptic companies include Immersion, Artificial Muscle, Senseg, Tactus, Smart Materials, Kyocera, AAC, Murata, SMK, and HiWave.

Steve Kingsley-Jones, another speaker at the event and the director of product management at Immersion, agreed that touch technology is critical to how we absorb and understand the world.

“It’s our goal to ensure that every mobile device on the planet feels good,” Kingsley-Jones said.

That is indeed a feel-good message. But even after years of trying, companies like Immersion have succeeded in getting their haptics technology built into tens of millions of cell phones, which are manufactured in the hundreds of millions every year. It won’t be easy to convince companies such as Apple, which has resisted force feedback technology for years, to adopt it now.

Ramstein said that the improved electro-mechanical polymer (EMP) technology that his company makes will enable haptics that is smaller, cheaper, and lighter than existing technology today. The EMP technology works by causing a material to bend when an electrical charge is applied to it. The chain of plastic molecules changes its shape under an applied voltage.

“It’s almost like a bag of cubes,” he said. “If you organize them and stack them, they take less space. When they are not organized, they take a lot more space. When you apply a voltage, the molecules line up.”

Ramstein believes forecasts that predict that 60 percent of smartphones will have advanced haptics by 2015.

By advanced, Ramstein means technology that vibrates in multiple locations, produces localized sounds, is integrated with a sensor, and supports multiple finger touches. It has to bend with a device and be both ultralight and flexible. Ramstein said that his modules have a response time of under 1 millisecond, making them faster, more elastic, and more forceful than competing technologies such as piezoceramic or elastomer. It is less than 50 microns thick (a micron is a millionth of a meter) and weighs less than a gram.

State College, Pa.-based Strategic Polymers hopes that its technology finds use beyond mobile applications. Other markets include car dashboards, home appliances, touchpads on laptops, speakers, and surgical tools. It is just one option of many haptics technologies that are coming down the road.

Ramstein became president and chief executive of Strategic Polymers in April. He replaced Ralph Russo, who ran the company since its founding in 2006. Russo was appointed chairman, replacing cofounder Qiming Zhang, who remains an advisor. Ramstein was previously chief technology officer at Immersion, a pioneer in haptics technology.

In 2010, the company focused its attention on haptics. The technology is still in development, and it is attracting attention from mobile device manufacturers, Ramstein said. The firm has about 20 employees.

Haptic feedback, or touch vibration sensors, have been built into game controllers for years. But now they’re also being used to improve the quality 0f bass sounds in high-end audio headphones.

Artificial Muscle is unveiling the audio application for its ViviTouch technology today, which makes the speakers in the headphones vibrate as if they had the benefit of a subwoofer. I listened to a demo version of the technology and felt the vibrations in my ears.

The company plans to show off the audio technology at the E3 trade show coming up on June 4 in Los Angeles. It is doing so because gamers are likely to appreciate the better sound quality. Artificial Muscle is in talks with multiple headphone makers and expects the technology will reach consumers later this year.

“You get a little buzz in your ear and it makes the bass sound better without forcing you to crank the volume all the way up,” said Dirk Schapeler, chief executive of Artificial Muscle, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Artificial Muscle is a partner with Immersion, a pioneering haptics firm that has a lot of patents in the fundamental technology behind touch feedback. Artificial Muscle, on the other hand, has developed technology for putting an actuator, or tiny motor, on a thin plastic film. The company can print circuitry that, when you apply power to it, makes a motor move back and forth. When attached to a solid mass such as a battery, it can make a device vibrate.

“Immersion develops the IP for the platforms such as Android,” said Schapeler. ”We create the technology and energy-efficient actuator to bring it into mobile devices.”

The advantage is that it consumes 70 percent less energy than a typical motor; it also moves a lot faster. By the time you get a touch effect from a typical motor, the image associated with it may be gone from a screen. But the Artificial Muscle actuator can respond within 5 milliseconds.

“When an event happens in a game, you can feel it immediately when you use our chips,” said Schapeler. “We can also generate a broad range of effects.”

Artificial Muscle was founded in 2004 as a spinoff from the famous Silicon Valley research lab SRI. It was acquired by Bayer Material Science in Germany. At the outset, Artificial Muscle was attacking the markets for small electrical motors, or actuators; the market for sensors; and energy generators.  Last fall, it launched its TouchSense 5500 actuator. It is being used in small pumps and valves in medical devices.

In consumer markets, Artificial Muscle is targeting gaming and audio. One application, pictured right, is a vibration-generating case for an iPod Touch. It automatically adds touch vibration effects when you touch a control button on the iPod Touch’s screen. Tens of thousands of those cases have been shipped to consumers.

In gaming, the company builds the hardware that can be used in devices such as game controllers. Then it encourages game developers to create games that make use of the haptics hardware.

Once the software is integrated with the hardware, consumers can feel effects like the feeling of a pinball rolling across a board.

“It’s a challenge to have all of those things happen at once,” Schapeler said.

Among the cool effects that Artificial Muscle has created: throwing dice in an iPhone app and then feeling the clicking of the plastic in your fingers.

Artificial Muscle now has 55 employees, including 35 in Sunnyvale, Calif. and 20 more in Germany.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 400 million mobile phones give you vibrational feedback thanks to technology from haptics (touch sense) firm Immersion.

Now the San Jose, Calif.-based Immersion is improving the nature of touch feedback in mobile phones with HD Integrator, which allows for much deeper integration of touch into Android devices. The technology can now be customized for consumers and take advantage of new high-fidelity actuators. Developers can now create realistic and engaging effects like the feel of a shaking maraca (pictured).

The technology helps create a “mental model.” The sense of touch can help convey a mental model in the same way that someone walking up a hill feels that the hill is steeper, compared to a person who is walking alongside a path in a sideways manner on the hill. Mental models can help communicate information and influence behavior. The tactile sensations of a shaking maraca can fill in the gap of what is happening.

“With HD Integrator, (gadget makers) can easily incorporate dynamic HD haptics throughout the Android user interface, resulting in a more responsive and higher quality haptic experience,” said Dennis Sheehan, vice president of marketing for Immersion.  “HD Integrator harnesses the capabilities of high fidelity actuators to serve as a communication channel to the user, an engaging entertainment platform, and a point of distinction.”

With the HD Integrator, a user interface can feel metallic, soft, or springy. Gestures such as finger swiping can be performed both on the screen or with the phone itself. And animations can be transformed into “multi-modal” experiences with cool sound and touch effects. The technology can layer effects so that you can distinguish the feel of an explosion or gunfire happening at the same time in a mobile game.

Andrew Hsu, the father of the capacitive touchscreen, previously told VentureBeat that he believes the future of mobile screens lies in haptics, rather than gimmicky features like 3D.

Immersion was founded in 1993 and it has about 100 employees around the world. Its technology appears in game consoles, automotive controls, medical simulators and mobile devices. Customers include Samsung, LG, Nokia, Pantech, Fujitsu and Toshiba.

Haptics has evolved over the years from a simple buzz vibration for alerts on your mobile hone to programmable haptics, where you feel different effects when scrolling or swiping. And HD haptics now include a broader range of distinct effects, fast response time, enhanced realism and dynamic effect capabilities. All of that means is that the sense of touch feedback is getting better.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Now that capacitive touchscreens have become the standard in mobile devices, many are looking for  the next big innovation.

3D is one possibility — smartphones featuring the technology like the Evo 3D are already available. But according to Synaptics technology strategist Andrew Hsu, father of the capacitive touchscreen, the future of touchscreens could more likely lie in haptics, a technology which would allow us to feel individual touchscreen elements.

“Where I see the next frontier of user interface control is that we now want to try and recreate the tactility we lost from traditional hardware interfaces,” Hsu said in an interview with VentureBeat. Refined haptics could bring us full circle in mobile interfaces, allowing us to feel software keyboards and buttons as if they were physical elements from cellphones in pre-iPhone days.

“Now that we’ve gotten dynamic touch and visual interfaces, it’s time to look towards dynamic touch feedback,” Hsu said.

Haptics isn’t exactly a new phenomenon — today many cellphones feature basic haptic feedback by buzzing when you hit a button on their touchscreens. The real key for refining the technology, according to Hsu, would be finding an implementation that would allow for finer localization of haptic feedback. He assumes it could take three to five years before his vision of deep haptic feedback comes to pass.

We’re already seeing small steps towards next-generation haptics from companies like Immersion, which has developed an Android platform to easily bring haptic capabilities to smartphones and tablets.

And what of 3D? Hsu wouldn’t make any final judgements on the technology yet, especially since it mostly seems like an excuse to create and view 3D media on phones at the moment, rather than fundamentally altering the way users interact with their devices. 3D screens could technically work together with future haptic technology. Hsu said he was really impressed with the Nintendo 3DS because it was made specifically with 3D in mind, unlike 3D smartphones and tablets.

Personally, the idea of a fully haptic screen excites me more than just a 3D screen. There’s plenty of potential in mobile gaming (imagine actually feeling buttons and joysticks again), and it would also make modern touchscreen phones more accessible for the disabled and elderly. I’d much rather the mobile industry move towards screens that can dynamically generate braille text for the blind to touch, rather than focusing on making us cross-eyed with tiny 3D screens.

In the film Blade Runner, a replicant was a biorobotic being which was virtually identical to a human but lacked emotion and empathy. I talked to Jakobsson about the future of interfaces and how they should use “the human APIs”.

“We see people and machines interacting in a very dumbed down way” he says. Jakobsson complains that 90 percent of the status updates in his Facebook stream are from Foursquare, Runkeeper or Gowalla.”The interface through which we are talking to each other is GPS coordinates, how many kilometers I have been running and songs shared on Spotify. We are using the APIs of a machine instead of the human APIs like voice and feelings and movement”.

Jakobsson sees a possible future in which our lives become cluttered with ever-fancier screens (see TAT’s future of screens video below), augmented reality and other machine-driven interfaces. “It’s not augmented reality, it’s dumbed down reality” he comments. “We come from an era where everything is clickable. Now we are saying, everything that is clickable in real life, let’s put a red tag on it, which is talking technology language. You are forcing people to become robots.” His alternative is to make interfaces more human and he sees designers as crucial to that process. “How do we create people to machine to people interfaces which make that interaction natural?”

Jakobsson is Swedish and he uses the analogy of cross-country skiing to explain the role of the designer. There is a huge difference between the effort required to ski on virgin snow and on a pre-defined track. The traditional role of the user interface designer was to make tracks that users can follow. While one of the designer’s jobs should still be “to create highway tracks”, Jakobsson would also like to see a process where users are allowed to ski around on a metaphorical open field and the tracks they create can be used by others. He describes this a more heuristic way to create a user interface.

Just as importantly, Jakobsson thinks that the designers role is not just to make a product pretty, something he regards as “lipstick on a pig” design. “Designers should be in the depth of engineering and even before engineering.” A large part of the designer’s task is to identify the specific niches or use cases which a product should address. “The question is really ‘Should we build a church or a monastery?’ Right now we are building holy places.” he explains. In other words, most technology products, and mobile phones in particular, address too broad an audience and set of uses.

“I think we will see much more of people having text and talk phones, in a sense. Simplifying but not dumbing down.” he says. “The problem today is that there are really just two phone categories: a smartphone with bells and whistles and no battery life or an old phone like a Nokia series 40″.

Every handset manufacturer is finding it hard to escape the trap of building an iPhone copy. Jakobsson cites INQ mobile as an exception to this trend. INQ makes phones designed for specific niches like social networking. “Let’s build this phone which has built-in Spotify and built-in Facebook. It doesn’t even look like an iPhone. I think INQ is going to be really successful” he says.

I asked Jakobsson for some examples of user interface technologies he likes. “I like gesture interfaces because that’s a very human approach. Gestures are very much more tactile.” But he also thinks that more natural interfaces introduce new problems. “The minute you do direct manipulation, for example using touch, it needs to be perfectly responsive. We are getting into the concept of the uncanny valley (when robots look and act almost, but not quite, like humans and actual humans are repulsed) for interfaces when you add physics engines, gestures, etc. because we are manipulating human to human interactions. When they are ten percent off, it’s just going to feel weird.”

He’s also not a big fan of haptics. ”Haptics for me is like voice recognition. It’s the best idea in the world but it just doesn’t work. In 5 to 10 years they will both work.” The ideal for Jakobsson is that technology starts to disappear. “The device you are holding in your hand will become thinner and thinner, not physically necessarily, but conceptually. You are going to think that you are not even holding a device.”