Tactai’s technology goes further than past touch feedback — or haptic — devices since it gives you a much more fine-grained sense of what you’re touching, based on a demo I saw. Tactai hopes to be part of the standard technologies in the next set of VR devices.
“We want to bring a rich sense of touch into the digital world to empower our interactions in a unique way,” said Steven Domenikos, cofounder and CEO of Tactai, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Waltham, Mass.-based Tactai has created software that shows off its “ultra high-fidelity haptics.”
In the demo, which you can see in the video, Domenikos used a standard pen input device to allow me to feel the texture of objects that I touched. When he activated the software associated with a stone tile, I moved the pen over the screen showing the stone tile. It felt rough and bumpy, just like real stone. The pen vibrated and enabled me to feel the sensations.