SleepyEgg

The most common form of force feedback in our electronic devices is the sort of rumbling buzz you get when a motor spins some sort of mass inside the case of your hardware. Video game controllers usually have two motors, one on each side of the controller, and that sort of "rumble in stereo" configuration allows for a number of effects based on the speed of each motor. This takes power, it takes space, and there's not much you can do with the technology. At CES I met with Vivitouch, a company that has created a sort of artificial muscle in the hopes of changing how we experience haptic effects in our devices.

The Vivitouch technology is small, almost perfectly flat, and after playing through a few demos using a consumer device that's available now, I was turned into a believer. That thin piece of plastic in the image above produces a rumble effect that's more responsive, subtle, and expressive than the technology that's currently the market standard.