Immersion will add touch feedback to Unity game engine

Developer Immersion hopes to bring high-quality touch feedback to more games through a partnership with Unity Technologies’ Unity game engine.

The companies announced the partnership at Unity Austin, Unity’s conference in Texas. Immersion is a longtime developer and licensor of haptics, or touch feedback such as the sensations you get with a rumble-enabled video game controller.

Game developers can now use Unity to access Immersion’s TouchSense Force Haptic Lab to integrate touch effects into their games built with the Unity engine. Immersion’s current mission is to give gamers a much more fine-grained sense of touch feedback from their games and controllers, in comparison to the aging Rumble technology.

Immersion’s Haptic Lab enables developers to adopt faster, real-time workflows for designing, testing, feeling and integrating haptics into their games. In addition to faster workflows, it maximizes haptic capabilities of commercial game controllers, including TouchSense Force technology-enabled peripherals, allowing developers to give users more realistic and immersive experiences.

The launch of Haptic Lab for Unity follows Immersion’s February 2017 announcement of its TouchSense Force solution for another leading game platform, the Unreal Engine.

“Expanding our TouchSense Force solution to be compatible with Unity adds tremendous opportunity for those developing games on this important platform,” said Chris Ullrich, a vice president Immersion, in a statement. “Developers can make their games much more engaging through the power of touch, including those for the latest popular systems.”