Mobile and video technologies supplier InterDigital has been selected to contribute to a new industry standard around haptics, alongside Interhaptics and Technical University of Munich (TUM).
The International Organisation for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) MPEG group selected the technologies for an emerging standard around haptic data representation and coding.
“We are honoured to contribute InterDigital’s integration layer technology to serve as the basis for critical industry standards in this exciting field of haptics,” said Philippe Guillotel, director of InterDigital. “In multimedia, standards are the common language our industry uses to communicate, and encoding standards are the core around which our value chain is modelled. We recognise the true impact and responsibility of this MPEG selection.”
InterDigital’s integration layer and user body coding were chosen for their congruence with traditional and future multimedia standards, as well as their support for future evolutions of immersive media. TUM’s wavelet coding technology was selected for its support of encoding haptics for high-frequency bands, while Interhaptics’ encoding architecture was selected for quality perceptual performances.
The selection of these technologies represents a critical step in developing the industry standards that will shape the emerging haptics market. MPEG released the first Call for Proposals on haptics in June 2021 to identify the reference architecture around which the future haptics standards should be developed, and on which future technologies will be based on it.
"The haptics market is missing today a vibrant community of creators designing memorable experiences for the end-user. This is the mission of Interhaptics," said Eric Vezzoli, Interhaptics CEO. "The MPEG haptics encoding standards are a stepping stone towards this goal. We are happy to collaborate with InterDigital and TUM to unlock the value of Haptics for the whole ecosystem."
Andreas Noll of TUM, added: “We are thrilled to contribute to the reference model technology in this very important and new field of haptics. Through the integration of technologies from the three proponents, we are able to deliver performance and flexibility for a wide variety of use cases. The developed architecture is well capable of evolving into a solid standard, and the combination of coding methods from InterHaptics and TUM promises to deliver the best of both approaches.”
InterDigital, TUM, and Interhaptics plan to collaborate in the MPEG framework to update and integrate the newly developed reference model into haptics standardization initiatives in the future. Throughout 2022, the three parties have agreed to collaborate to enhance the reference model and finalise specifications around haptics.
