Ultrasonic Gaming

Like it when your game controller vibrates? You're part of the majority that ought to be impressed by all the goodness that haptic technology has to offer. Takayuki Iwamoto and his team at the University of Tokyo have developed a device that uses ultrasound waves to create invisible surfaces that you can feel, which means that eventually, you'll be able to poke your enemies in the eye, and feel the squish against your finger.



Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the device can only create fake surfaces in the vertical plane, and can't go beyond a certain intensity, lest it bust your eardrums. Eventually, though, the researchers hope to create a device that will let you interact with objects as you would in reality--squash soft stuff, bonk against hard surfaces, that sort of thing.