2020, a year of success for the Interhaptics team
This year has been very different in all kinds of ways and will definitely be remembered for all kinds of reasons. The month of December is the ideal time to step back and take stock of how far we have come. And about Interhaptics, we have come a long way.
It all started with one mission: creating a haptic ecosystem. Interhaptics wants to enable creators and users to implement and experience the wonderful haptics across all technologies and platforms.
This is how the creation of Interhaptics started, and we named our product as INTERchangable HAPTICS to stress the need for a Haptics ecosystem.
To celebrate, what could be better than rewinding this year full of emotions?
In February 2020, the Interhaptics beta launched. More than 250 creators participated in the 7-month long period to refine our product and get it ready for the launch. They shared great feedback and insight on how to use Haptics in XR and helped us understand how both haptics and interactions are linked in the perception of creators and users.
In March 2020, Interhaptics was accepted to join Oculus ISV Program and was able to play a part in the pre-release testing of the Oculus Quest 2. It was a great opportunity to see what was upcoming and prepare for the real scale-up of VR thanks to this wonderful device.
In September 2020 we launched the commercial release of Interhaptics after a long beta testing period. The team could not be prouder. The launch marked the first multiplatform haptics and interaction design system on the market.
In October 2020, SenseGlove and Interhaptics partnered to streamline haptics development for exoskeletons. This is our first public collaboration and one of the first steps towards the creation of a Haptics ecosystem.
We are committed to empower the ecosystem to grow, and the basis is to create solid learning material for creators on Haptics. Therefore, we launched the first haptics design course in the world with remarkable responses from the community. More than 900 students subscribed it to date.
In November 2020, Interhaptics announced a lot of exciting news.
Starting with the fact that it will support hand tracking interactions design for Hololens 2, which is one of the major XR platforms used in business applications.
Second, Interhaptics came with the launch of the beta for mobile haptics design for Android phones. Smartphones are the largest haptics planform in the world and creators do not really have powerful creation tools for Haptics.
Finally, after the announcement of the release of Sony’s PlayStation 5, and its high-performance controllers, Interhaptics also announced that it will be compatible with the console’s haptics. Game developers will soon be able to easily create, design, render and deploy haptic material using Interhaptics’ Haptics Composer on all 4 actuators. All in a few clicks in early 2021.
Lots of Christmas gifts also in December!
Our ambition to create an ecosystem picked the interest of Sensoryx, which is partnering with us to provide great interaction design capabilities for VRfree gloves. This will be a great tool for practical training for Mixed Reality use case, where real and virtual objects need to co-exist to give a great experience to the users.
More recently, Interhaptics and Innoactive announced their partnership around haptic design and hand-tracking for Innoactive’s Creator (read article). Innoactive plays a fundamental role in providing a platform and tools to ease the production of scenarios for VR training in enterprises. Interhaptics will bring the implementation of believable interactions through hand tracking, and haptics devices. This will give a great advantage for accessibility and user engagement during the training.
We could not be more excited to start in 2021. The Haptics ecosystem is responding to our mission, and we are looking forward to sharing with you a lot of exciting developments in the upcoming year.
With Love, The Interhaptics Team.
