You’re Getting Warmer…

Haptic technology is all the rage in the cell phone world these days. Haptics, the study of touch, are what’s at work when you touch a button and it “touches you back� via vibration or another physical cue.

Many new game technologies use haptic technology to give a deeper sensation of being in the game; rumbling controls allow you to swing a virtual tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball. Some recent cell phone models, including the Motorola RAZR 2, also use haptic technology to provide sensory feedback when you access the controls; this allows you, for example, to use the touch screen without looking.

Now German and Swedish researchers are combining sensory feedback with GPS devices built into cell phones to help keep users on an intended path, via a high-tech version of “you’re getting warmer.�

The device heats up as the user stays on track and gets closer to the desired destination and cools down when the user strays from the desired path. The researchers are also suggesting that you could set different temperature levels for different callers to identify “hot� or need to take calls and “cool� calls that can wait. I’m all for anything that keeps phones quiet but I hope they set maximum and minimum temperatures because we certainly don’t need anyone getting frostbite when they get lost.