Sensory overload be gone.
That's Denver-based Somatic Labs' plan, at least, and hopes to get there by replacing sight alerts with touch through its subscription-based service.
It's a haptic (or touch) communication technology company that programs wearable products and headgear with software. Together, these tools run custom touch patterns to give the person wearing them alerts without having to look at a screen.
Shantanu Bala, the company's co-founder and CEO, began working with haptic technology research when he was 15 and continued throughout college. He wanted to make haptic technology that was accessible for the market and realized that starting a company would be the quickest way to do that.
“A lot of improvements [mankind has] made in technology are simply unusable and inaccessible in a wide range of work environments."
“The dominant medium for which we interact with media technology is through these cold pieces of glass,” said co-founder and CPO Jake Rockland. “Human interaction is so much more than that. Touch is such a fundamental part of how we interact with each other.”
Cut to 2016, when Bala, Rockland and two of their friends debuted Somatic Labs. It started with a clear-cut mission: design something completely unique.
"A lot of the existing devices on the market were basically a smaller version of your cell phone — shrunk down and strapped to your wrist,” Bala said. “The experience we needed to design would completely disappear from your day-to-day life, and add value without you even having to think about it.”
The current design Somatic Labs is working on resembles a headband that can fit into existing headgear or a helmet. The headgear gets its signals through a USB connection or Bluetooth.
The devices come with access to a software system where users can set up different sensation patterns and alert mechanisms, which Rockland described as similar to GarageBand. The software is simple and users don’t need an engineering background or knowledge of code to create patterns and sequences.
The software comes with over 100 patterns already, but users can alter them or create their own. The patterns can also be taken out of the software and integrated into other existing software.
It works like this: Those wearing the device feel touch alerts on their forehead. For example, an alert for the user to turn right would feel like someone dragging their finger from above the wearer's left ear over to the right side of the forehead.
These alerts are better than the traditional sight-based notifications, Bala said, because those can environment-breaking distractions. Which, depending on the wearer's profession, can be incredibly detrimental.
“A lot of improvements [mankind has] made in technology are simply unusable and inaccessible in a wide range of work environments,” he added.
For example, one of Somatic Labs' customers is located at the Johnson Space Center at NASA. Bala said they are working to incorporate technology like Somatic's so that people sitting in mission control have less distraction and overstimulation as they monitor a host of technologies while communicating with multiple people at once. Receive alerts and direction through touch could help do just that.
Some of the company’s other customers hail from fields such as mining and construction, Bala added. Subscriptions begin at $3,000 per month, with prices varying based on the client's specific project.
Additionally, Somatic Labs is in the process of raising its first seed round of funding. With this funding, Bala said he hopes that the company can continue to make their product less and less intrusive to customers so they can forget it is even there.
