Meta to acquire Lofelt, a company specializing in haptics

The acquisition was discovered by the wall street journal. Zuckerberg’s firm set to buy Lofelta German company specializing in the perception of the body in the environment (more commonly called haptics). This technology would make up for the lack of physical sensations that we all experience in virtual reality, in other words the feeling of being able to “really hold an object” and by extension feel the impact of bullets, feel the rain falling on you, etc.

Lofelt has developed software tools that allow developers to integrate high-quality haptic elements into their applications, whether mobile games, consoles or VR. One of the main features of its flagship product, Lofelt Studiois the haptic rendering of audio files. As an example, it is possible to feel the vibrations of driving a car from the engine noise sound file. The company is not at its first attempt, because it had also worked on a haptic bracelet in 2017, a subwoofer mobile phone called basslet.

Experience Lofelt with the bracelet basslet could prove useful for the ambitions of Meta in terms of immersion. With the prototype Touch And Squeeze Wristband Interface (TASBI), Meta experimented with sensory substitution – tricking your brain into interpreting haptic feedback on the wrist as coming from your finger by matching it to appropriate simultaneous visual stimuli. bassletbilled as a “subwoofer for your wrist,” didn’t take off as a product, but patented engine technology LoSound that underlies it could enable haptics with more punch than competing actuators (bassme to name only the best known).

Lofelt

basslet however, was not the company’s focus for five years. It has recently focused on its development tools, which is probably the main reason for the acquisition by Meta. The latter currently offers a SDKs appointed Interaction allowing developers to easily add high-quality manual interactions (like object grabbing) to apps VRwithout having to reinvent the wheel. Zuckerberg’s firm may be considering using the technology of Lofelt also to launch SDKs haptics or to integrate haptic tools into the SDKs Interaction existing.

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