New sensations
San Francisco Business Times - by Lizette Wilson Lwilson@Bizjournals.Com
Bright orange butterflies dart between glistening palm fronds, still wet with rain. You touch the smooth, cool bark of a 500-year-old hardwood, look up and see the rain forest canopy teeming with rare species.
The earth smells alive -- part decomposition, part new growth -- and the cries of howler monkeys surround you.
Welcome to the new web experience.
From 3-D goggles and CyberGloves to digitized setups that puff odors through a desktop hardware device, area tech companies are helping to create a brave new web world to compete with the real experience.
Although some enhanced perceptions may not be commercially available for another few years -- and in the taste arena where no company's leading R&D, probably longer -- technology enabling sensory web is here now and developing quickly.
The most sophisticated development so far is with 3-D vision. IPIX, a company co-headquartered in San Ramon and Oakridge, Tenn., is commercializing technology originally developed for NASA robots which enables a 360-degree view of traditionally 2-D content.
The device is actually pretty simple. Two fish-eye lenses are placed back to back to form a crystal-like sphere. An image is picked up through the entire lens simultaneously, broadcast through the cable modem and then viewed on the computer screen. Its primary application, so far, has been in the real estateand travel markets. Home buyers can control the camera and scan a room by moving the mouse. Actor Will Smith bought his multimillion-dollar Philadelphia abode after a short online virtual tour and big spenders at auctions are beginning to follow suit.
"Where we're headed next is movies," said iPIX CEO Jim Phillips, noting Sylvester Stalone's new car race movie, "Driven," incorporates the technology. The effect, says Phillips, is bringing the viewer into the physical scene by providing them 360-degree views of the action, be it NASCAR, rock concerts, pro-wrestling or orthoscopic knee surgery. Phillips said he's working now with the NFL and major television networks to place microscopic lenses inside players' helmets so at-home viewers could watch football from the players' perspective.
IPIX is also working with Sony and other hardware manufacturers to build the lenses into cameras and goggles, which would allow users even more control of their experience.
Said Phillips: "With increasing bandwidth it's just going to make it better and better. We're working with Digiscents and several audio companies too for complete sound. We want to give the entire experience."
Sound moguls Dolby of San Francisco and THX of San Rafael dialed the surround sound technology years ago for use in movie theaters and are pushing that technology now for wider use over the Internet.
With streaming media advances there'll be fatter pipes, a faster connection and therefore a greater ability to push more information through -- an advance that would also help Oakland-based Digiscents drive commercial adoption of its iSmell device.
The company currently employs a handful of scentographers -- including the former head of Bath and Body Works -- to create a palate of smells. Stale whiskey, pizza, ocean and rain are a few of the thousands they're digitizing now.
Engineers assign digital codes to each of those smells, and combinations thereof, in a software program which is then read by the Digiscents hardware device. The iSmell is equipped with an odor packet that will work much like an color ink cartridge for printers: when it runs out, users can go and refill it.
"We see this as a whole new art form," said Digiscents co-founder and President Dexter Smith. "We can mix together and create thousands of smells -- hundreds are recognizable. Smell is the most powerful sense in linking emotion and memory."
Digiscents has partnered with Real Networks, Procter and Gamble, and several large fragrance firms to assist development. The firm is finishing up R&D now -- its scentware development kit has attracted 3,900 developers to write software for the technology since March -- and anticipates the product will be commercially available after it announces a retail partner in a few more months.
Smith sees applications for the technology in gaming, advertising, entertainment and e-commerce -- the same markets San Jose-based Immersion is targeting.
Immersion has invented technology that hardware manufacturers, such as mouse-maker Logitech, now license. The new so-called "touchy-feely" mouse has internal motors that vibrate, creating sensations when a user drags it across a web page embedded with interactive links. This means users can feel when they hit menus, scroll bars, hyperlinks and other targets and don't need to rely as heavily on their hand eye coordination -- a help for elderly users and those with disabilities.
"In today's computer environment, you're impaired," said Immersion founder and Chairman Louis Rosenberg. "You have to reach out and touch things continually, but you can't feel them -- it's a ghost."
Immersion's technology is now available in two mouses -- they began shipping last fall -- and allows for dozens of sensations. Depending on what sensations are embedded into software code, users can feel basic textures and contours, For example, a user can feel the difference between thick and thin cables on sweaters, but silk and satin feel the same. Immersion, which acquired Palo Alto-based Virtual Technologies and its popular CyberGlove, is continuing to court developers to embed code in standard web pages which will transmit to its devices.
Said Rosenberg: "What we're doing is enhancing the ability to perceive -- to understand what you're interacting with and manipulate it. The human hand is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom."
Lizette Wilson covers technology for the San Francisco Business Times.
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