Himalayan News Service

Edinburgh, February 25:

A mobile phone is being launched that can send playful tickles down the line — or even a smack across the face. The Samsung handset can vibrate in a way that enables one to add sensations to the text message, including making the person on the other end feel as if they have been slapped, Scottish daily Scotsman reported.

The technology is called ‘haptics’ — the creation of touch and texture through artificial stimuli. And its use is already widespread in video games, in the vibrating controllers and force-feedback steering wheels that accompany the likes of Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox. These devices give the player a sense of how good a virtual golfing shot was from the feedback in the game controller, or let you feel how close you are to being run off the road in racing games.

But the new phone, to be launched at March-end, will be the first mass-market use of haptics. The sender of a text message can add one of a number of sensations from a menu. When the receptor reads the message ‘vibrotactile’ motors in the recipient’s phone are activated. The mechanism is a more complex version of the motors that currently allow many mobile phones to vibrate when ringing. The frequency and amplitude of the vibrations generated by the motors simulate the desired sensation.

Ed Colgate, a mechanical engineer who works on haptics at the Northwestern University, Chicago, said, “I have been waiting for this for a few years. It’s a challenge to develop systems that are low-cost and lightweight.”