My first introduction to the term ‘haptics’ was in the early 90s when my professor talked about the dramatic “fly by wire” transformation that the airline industry had experienced in the previous decade. Due to the size of the aircraft, it was impractical to physically connect the control surfaces with the pilot as you do in a small aircraft. Instead, the airline industry behemoths required hydraulic assistance, much like the power steering in your car. This removed the mechanical linkage in favor of electronic control, hence “fly by wire.” The problem was that all pilots trained on smaller airplanes and removing that direct mechanical “feel” was alienating. The fledgling technology of “haptics” was brought into the commercial and industrial world with computer algorithms that made the power-assisted flight controls _feel_ like they were mechanically connected to the yolk. To this day, Boeing continues this paradigm with “natural” feeling flight controls, whereas AirBus breaks precedent entirely with a side throttle and center joystick.

Since that initial, personally revealing glimpse thirty years ago that the sense of touch can profoundly affect our everyday experience, haptics as a commercial technology has been a disappointing slide into irrelevance. In the late 1990s there was great potential for the “Rumble Pak” to add breakthrough experiences in gaming systems, but unfortunately too many early game implementations moved past ‘stimulating’ into ‘incredibly annoying.’ Most, if not all gamers just simply turned off the vibrations. Then, huzzah, the smartphone arrives in the early 2000s and scales of economy result in a small shaking motor in everyone’s pocket. The now ubiquitous buzz to inform of a text or call is commonplace, and it is the most pervasive vestige of the promising “haptics” technology revolution that started three decades prior.

What makes that pioneering Boeing implementation of haptics so successful is that it replaced an actual missing, real-world touch sensation. Unlike that fly-by-wire implementation of haptics, the convention now is to shake your phone or game controller as someone’s _substitution_ for real-world sensations. During Mario Cart, does crashing off a racetrack feel anything like buzzing? What, in fact, should that text notification feel like (if anything)? If you’re like me, the _last_ thing you would choose for a notification is an uncontrolled buzz. This train of thought lead me to an epiphany about five years ago – asking myself, what would I chose as a sensation to replace a tap on the shoulder? Could I even choose something that someone else would like? What if each and every user could design their _own_ sensation to indicate a notification? Better yet, what if the user could not only design the sensation, but also choose its meaning? In that case, the entire message, sender and content, and the notification of its arrival could be expressed as a set of sensations I myself choose, and it wouldn’t even require me to take my phone out of my pocket to ‘get the message.’

The vibration hardware is already in every device that I use. What’s missing is the network connection between them. Thus, the “Haptics of Things” network was born using a smartphone app called vring. Users create their own sensations and what they mean. Of course, the human sense of haptics is a lot more than just vibration, and the Haptics of Things network is capable of exchanging any kind of physical sensation as long as the devices at each end can deliver it. That’s where we at Distal Reality and vring  are heading. We believe the future of how you interact through, and with, the digital world deserves a physical upgrade: our new controller, called ¡mpath, can deliver sensations such as shape, texture, even wetness in addition to the vibrations you’re accustomed to. The Haptics of Things network gives the internet a new channel for communication and expression with vring, and ¡mpath will act as a catalyst for AR and VR worlds to come.