Need advice on disseminating force feedback technology

WAI IG members,

Immersion is finishing a Phase I NSF SBIR (sponsored by Larry Scadden and in
collaboration with John Gardner).  The Phase I project developed enabling
technology for Web-based force feedback tutorials, and included a tutorial
architected by John that lets students feel the forces on a charged particle
in the field of another charged particle.  The tutorial also allows the
student to gather data points and to feel a graph plotted from those data
points.  We're working on a Phase II proposal to NSF, and are interested in
gathering advice on the dissemination of this technology.  If you have
questions about technology implementation details, Evan Wies
(evan@immerse.com) is the one to ask, or hit http://www.force-feedback.com
for more general info.

I have two questions for you:

1.  How can the community make sure that comprehensive and accessible
science education resources make it onto the Web?  Can we get beyond the
point where isolated groups put up a few good demos for a few years until
they run out of funding?  How do we get comprehensive support for a
comprehensive list of high school and basic college courses in a central
location with a sustainable operations/business model?

2.  If you can think of anyone we should collaborate with in our
dissemination activities, please put us in touch with them.  Potential
activities include providing hardware and a limited set of software
tutorials to an educational program for trials with students in a classroom,
providing hardware and tutorial software to education researchers to support
a controlled study, putting our tutorials on an accessible SEM website so
anyone with $99 to buy a Logitech force feedback mouse anywhere in the world
can try them, etc.

Thanks for your help.  Have a fun (and safe) 4th of July weekend.

Regards,

Chris Hasser
Chief Research Engineer
Immersion Corporation

Received on Thursday, 1 July 1999 20:37:58 UTC