Back at GDC 2013, we caught up with Tactical Haptics and demoed their Reactive Grip technology which seeks to provide players with convincing tactile sensations on controllers and other peripherals. The company has released a new video showing two new demos that show off the Reactive Grip technology.

Tactical Haptics’ initial Reactive Grip prototypes are based the Razer Hydra by Sixense. They’ve gutted the peripheral and added their tech to create a motion controller that reacts to what the player is doing on screen with compelling tactile feedback.

At GDC 2013 I tried a few different demos with their prototype — a gun, sword, and morning star, all of which provided convincing feedback.

The company is now showing off two new demos, a slingshot and a car:

Having used the system before, I’ve got a good feeling that the slingshot demo will feel great. The car demo is interesting as they’ve supplanted the steering wheel with a virtual joystick… what’d I’d also like to see would be a full blown racing wheel with Reactive Grip included, that way those of us without $60,000 to spare might be able to get a bit of the simulated racing experience!

You can find the latest at the Tactical Haptics Facebook Page, where the company recently teased, “…we’ve now shrunk the size of the handle of our Reactive Grip Motion Controller down to a similar size as the handle of the Sixense Wireless Dev Kit’s controllers… so once we start showing this publicly, the forums will really be confused about whether our tech is in their wireless controller… =)”

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • drifter

    Tactical Haptics made another informative comments on their FB page :

    ” We may actually ship our controllers with a STEM [sixsense tracking module] on them (for people that buy the base STEM system without additional tracking modules), but cost-wise I doubt we could make a system that combines our haptics and ALL of the necessary Sixense tracking at a cost that people would back on Kickstarter.”

    I also asked about a wireless Reactive Grip :

    “Wireless will be tough in its first release as a dev kit (which I’m assuming will be on Kickstarter). The goal is to get it wireless for the consumer release though. I doubt we’ll be able to hit the Sony spec of 10 or 12 hour battery life (like they have for the Move) without making the device be too heavy though, so there will need to be a compromise on weight and battery life (which will probably include a few quick swappable, quick charge batteries). (this follows the progression / evolution release path of the Hydra and Rift)”

    • Tactical Haptics

      Thanks for passing this info along, as its sometimes difficult to keep up with all the blog posts. We’ll also be talking directly with Sixense again this week.