Nanoport launches Titan Haptics with magnetic touch feedback

Nanoport is launching its Titan Haptics division today as component of its move to build haptics, or touch feedback, for virtual buttons in smartphones.

Titan Haptics utilizes the technologies produced by the Toronto, Canada-based Nanoport, which utilizes a sort of magnet technologies, dubbed Linear Magnetic Ram (LMR), to make tiny small motors that can make the sensation of touch feedback with a smartphone surface, such as the side of a phone. You press the side, triggering the LMR, and it feels like you are pressing a physical button.

Titan Haptics will license this technologies in a bundle with motor licensing from Immersion, a publicly traded firm that has a lot of patents about haptic technologies. Haptics remains one of the hardest points to get proper in games, exactly where virtual tasks like reloading a gun is supposed to really feel more realistic for the reason that you get force feedback from a game controller.

The firm is launching a devoted industrial plan along with a brand-new mobile actuator. Nicknamed Grenville, this miniaturized element brings the features and rewards of LMR technologies to smaller sized, transportable devices like smartphones, wearables, and handheld game consoles. It can also be utilized in virtual reality headsets, and it has licensed it to place-based entertainment firm Striker VR, mentioned Titan Haptics founder Tim Szeto in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We know about HD for audio and video; it’s time for touch to have an HD upgrade,” Szeto mentioned. “Touch is an opportunity to offer  differentiated experiences not just for gaming, but new use cases too, like music and virtual buttons on touchscreens.”

As development in gaming continues, specially in the places of augmented reality and the metaverse, haptic feedback features are increasing to be a exclusive differentiator in the competitive hardware industry.

The firm began as Nanoport, a study and development lab. Now it is spinning out Titan Haptics as a industrial business enterprise. Nanoport has about 20 individuals, and it is the biggest shareholder in Titan Haptics. Titan Haptics is in the method of raising a round of income.

“We’re spinning out our haptics company. It’s gone really well in the lab. Then we had a lot of traction and interest from all sorts of folks from industry,” Szeto mentioned. “The timing is right.”

Origins

The tech development began in 2017, when Nanoport began to focus on magnetic arrays and how they could be controlled and produced in mass quantities.

“Getting something from the lab to mass-producible and reliable is a tall order,” Szeto mentioned. “So it did take some time. We’ve had some incredible progress, even during COVID, actually.”

Initially, Nanoport was attempting to resolve a trouble for foldable devices and modular devices, exactly where you combine various devices collectively. The query was regardless of whether there could be buttons in the areas exactly where the folding occurred. But the firm then decided to come up with a quite realistic button press that felt like you have been pressing a button, even even though it was a “software-defined button,” not an actual physical button.

It’s related to the concept of having force feedback when you press one thing on a touchscreen, rather than a physical button. In this case, with computer software-defined buttons, traditional haptics didn’t truly work.

“So we came up with this technology to solve that problem of having a very realistic button press on the edge of a device, even though it’s a software-defined button,” Szeto mentioned.

Unconventional

Conventional haptic devices use tiny piezoelectric springs to oscillate and make a feeling of touch feedback. That’s how most contemporary haptics from providers like Immersion work. But Nanoport does not use any springs. Instead, it utilizes magnetic arrays.

“You can think of either a maglev train or you those desk ornaments that seem to levitate in the air,” Szeto mentioned. “Those kinds of magnetic arrays are what we’ve taken and miniaturized in a passive format, so it doesn’t require power, and then implemented it inside of a haptic device. The cool thing about that is that, without springs, you have just one moving part now, instead of a complex mechanism.”

With this mechanism, you can lead to an object to move and make it hit the side of a device and make influence that feels like genuine haptics, like the feeling of a button getting pressed.

“When you click the diaphragm button on the side, it’s actually a very nice, sharp click, make a high G-force-kind of very short click,” Szeto mentioned. “That’s how we’ve incorporated this type of approach into haptics. And it turns out that, beyond this benefit, there are quite a lot of other ones as well.”

Nanoport spent the last handful of years figuring on the physics.

“Piezoelectrics are good for like very short distance vibrations, with high frequency and short travel,” Szeto mentioned. “Those are very different from gaming haptics, where you want a lot of displacement. So when something vibrates, you want it to move to have significant motion like in a gaming controller. You feel it rumble.”

Doing the physics simulations on this took a lengthy time. Szeto mentioned the resulting actuator, or motor, is a lot smaller sized than other folks. A lot of that is due to replacing the springs with strong-state suspension, he mentioned.

Licensing

The firm has worked in tandem with Immersion, which has a substantial patent portfolio with haptics. So now it has a uncommon business enterprise chance, for the reason that it can now license its personal tech to shoppers at the very same time it licenses Immersion’s haptic patents as effectively.

“We’re hoping to find a way to streamline this not just for ourselves but for the industry,” Szeto mentioned.

Unlike audio and video, HD touch is a new technologies stack, facing the very same challenges of any new technologies introduction. There are handful of professionals in the business with the multidisciplinary knowledge required for integrating the numerous elements, electronics, computer software, and intellectual house.

To streamline integrations, Titan provides firmware, computer software, application programming interfaces (APIs), and blueprint reference styles alongside its motors. Reference styles speed up the engineering and integration method for widespread gaming, smartphones and touchscreen solutions.

In 2018, Nanoport announced a new haptic motor for VR and gaming accessories that generates robust HD touch sensations in a basic and compact design and style.

In 2019, Nanoport presented a design and style for a universal haptics protocol at the Smart Haptics business conference. In 2020 Nanoport helped located the Haptics Industry Forum, chairing a essential workgroup to harmonize protocols later in 2021.

Szeto thinks of Titan as the higher-finish of haptics, and it could work for points like virtual reality and smartphones. Its 1st partnership is with Striker VR, a place-based entertainment firm.

“It lets you generate things like extremely high G-force gunshots,” he mentioned. “You can use it for things like military training or location-based VR.”

The firm hopes to have more announcements coming later this year.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz