We’re delighted Immersion is continuing its support of MEX this year, expanding its role to become Platinum sponsor of both the Conference and the Awards.

Craig Vachon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mobility at Immersion Corporation explained why: “Immersion Corporation is the world leader in touch feedback technologies for digital interfaces, so user experience is our reason for being. We have been attending MEX since 2007 and have found it to be a consistently rich venue for thought leadership in this domain. We hope our Platinum sponsorship of this year’s event will help further the quality of discourse that MEX will facilitate, arming us and our mobile industry customers with deeper insights into the potential role of touch in the design of hardware, applications, and services.”

We asked Immersion to step away from the standard corporate profile and tell us a little more about what user experience really means to them. Here’s what they had to say:

The use of touch surfaces as interface mechanisms in some of the most iconic mobile devices of recent times has led the design community to more actively consider the role of touch in mobile user experiences. Do we give something up when we swap mechanical controls for screen-based ones? Are there ways to mitigate the loss of confirming tactile feedback from buttons, sliders, and scrollwheels as they are virtualized?

Which has led us to think about the subtler, deeper ways that the sense of touch might be brought to bear in mobile user experience design. (By the way, this study of touch and its role in our interaction with the world is known as haptics)

Touch can convey information with less cognitive loading than other senses. As the functional complexity of mobile devices increases, and as the environments they are used in get more cluttered with sights, sounds, and secondary tasks, can touch feedback be used as an adjunct to the visual and auditory channels, offloading them to reduce user stress and improve efficiency?

Touch feedback is silent and discreet, experienced only by the user of a device. Can designers invent rich signaling modes that use the tactile channel to convey information in socially sensitive situations?

Touch is the most elemental, visceral, and personal of senses. Can we use it to convey affect, or emotion, in digitally-mediated interpersonal interactions where social context is otherwise lost? Will we tap into that power to reinforce consumer brand experiences, or shore up intimacies stretched by distance?

We don’t have all the answers, but we enjoy enabling the possibilities. Since 1993, Immersion Corporation has been providing the world’s leading consumer electronics, automotive, and industrial companies with the technologies and knowhow to build the sense of touch into human machine interfaces. Three of the top five global handset OEMs have chosen Immersion’s TouchSense Solution for Mobile Devices to add tactile feedback to mobile user interfaces, applications, alerts, and multimedia.

Immersion is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has offices in Helsinki, London, and Seoul. Ask us how to make touch part of your mobile user experience strategy.

URL: immersion.com/mobility
Contact: mobility@immersion.com

To reserve your sponsorship or find out more about opportunities at MEX, please contact Marek Pawlowski (by email or +44 (0)7767 622957).