THE trouble with shopping on the Internet is that you can鈥檛 touch anything.
Fortunately, that may be about to change with a motorised computer mouse that
can give Web surfers the sensation of texture鈥攐r other physical
attributes鈥攐f items pictured on the Net.
Visitors to last week鈥檚 Web99 convention in San Francisco were able to test
out the `Feel It鈥� mouse: running the cursor over a picture of a tennis racket
let a user feel the tautness of the strings. You could also feel the texture of
a pair of corduroy jeans or test-drive a car, feeling how it handles the curves
and accelerates on the straight. And the mouse even simulates an attempt to move
through a heavy wind.
Until now, the technology to create such a mouse was only available in
consoles and joysticks for computer games. Originally developed by Stanford
University and NASA, force-feedback technology was first used for flight
simulation. Recently, Immersion Corporation in San Jose, California, managed to
achieve the fast data exchange rates needed to provide realistic tactile
sensations when someone is shopping on the Web.
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The mouse is attached to a pad which contains two motors in a small housing
at the top, one to move the mouse right to left, and the other to move it up and
down. As you move your cursor over an image on a Web page, embedded motion
commands are sent to a microprocessor in the mouse, telling it how to move to
produce the desired sensation.
Internet shopping sprees aside, one of the best applications for this
technology is in schools, says Robert Tinker, a physicist who runs a
nonprofit-making company dedicated to using emerging technologies in education.
Tinker plans to use the force-feedback mouse to teach children about the forces
of nature, especially the atomic level forces they cannot see. 鈥淲ith this
technology, kids can feel their way around a molecule,鈥� says Tinker.
The $99 mouse goes on sale in the US in the autumn. For the technology
to proliferate, Web designers need only download free software from
www.FEELtheWEB.com to embed the relevant Feel It commands in images, says
Ramon Alarcon of Immersion.