Victor Viegas is from Immersion which is a company that works in haptics and where he is CEO. It has a licensing model and its technology is in more than three billion devices. It has 2,200 patents, issued and applied for. He first talked about how important touch is to people. He pointed out that touch can help you to suspend disbelief in VR applications. In entertainment technology, over the long term, there has been a trend for each new technology to become more immersive.
Some touch features such as vibration, pressure and friction are already available, but in the future new sensations such as ‘squeeze’ will be developed. VR haptics are really improving with better controllers using wideband LRA haptic controllers. You’ll feel the rumble or other effects.
Haptics has to be part of a system which needs a console, content and a controller. These need to work together to develop a really rich experience. The toolkit to develop the experience is very important, so Immersion has tools that put haptics alongside audio and video content. Weaponry, road effects and interactivity are all available. VR is about bringing as many senses as possible together to create and develop a new experience.
There are a lot of applications in art and entertainment and Viegas went through some of the applications that HTC had covered.
