SAN JOSE, Calif.-Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. released the industry’s first mobile phones featuring Immersion Corp.’s VibeTonz touch feedback technology. Samsung’s VibeTonz-capable SPH-G1000 and SCH-G100 handsets are available in the Korean market, and the company is gearing up to release the VibeTonz-capable SCH-n330 in the United States sometime this month.
Immersion’s technology is based on haptics, the science of touch. Instead of simply vibrating on and off, Immersion’s technology synchronizes a phone’s vibration with ringtones, games and other applications. Thus, phone vibrations can be manipulated to pulse slow or fast, in time with an action game or hip-hop ringtone.
“We’re taking the rumble in the game console and moving it into the mobile space,” said John Grundy, vice president and general manager of Immersion’s mobility business.
Immersion’s technology works in a variety of applications, most notably in the vibrating video game controllers for Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox. The company two years ago decided to expand into the mobile-phone business. Immersion signed an agreement with Samsung in 2003. Grundy said the company is in talks with other handset makers.
Immersion is offering a somewhat unique business model in wireless. The company is charging a sub-$1 per-unit licensing fee to handset makers using its technology and is requiring a 5-percent revenue-share split with content developers that want to design phone applications that make use of VibeTonz vibration functions. Grundy said the company has already signed deals with several large, unnamed content developers for such revenue-sharing agreements.
The VibeTonz technology makes use of the standard vibrating mechanism in mobile phones, but adds 15 kilobytes of software that synchronizes the vibrations with phone applications.
