The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) runs an innovation-oriented strategic basic research program known as “ACCEL.” Alps Alpine has been involved in research and development activities of one ACCEL project – Embodied Media Technology Based on Haptic Primary Colors (2015–2020) – since the very start of development activity. Susumu Tachi, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, heads the project, which has attracted leading researchers in the field, including professors Kouta Minamizawa of Keio University, Hiroyuki Shinoda of the University of Tokyo and Hiroyuki Kajimoto of the University of Electro-Communications.

ACCEL supports societal implementation and industrial deployment of innovative research. Advancements are anticipated in implementation of telemedicine, remote control and telexistence, fields where the quantification and communication of feel will be essential. The Embodied Media Project conducts research based on the principle of “haptic primary colors” whereby – in similarity to the conventional three primary colors – elements such as pressure, vibration and temperature are combined to enable quantification and transmission of various types of feel. Alps Alpine took on development of a module that could present two of these elements, vibration and temperature, and managed to create a “Two Tactile Sensations Presentation Module” incorporating a HAPTIC™ Reactor and a number of Peltier devices. The module enabled tactile sensations previously unavailable in the commercial market and achieved size reductions and power savings supporting use in diverse fields.

Through the ACCEL program, which looked to speed up innovation in a variety of domains, such as virtual reality, remote control and telexistence, Alps Alpine further enriched its feel expertise for application to its HAPTIC™ offerings.

Alps Alpine is advancing efforts to build up a hierarchical system of technologies encompassing know-how in the field of feel creation relating to HAPTIC™ and other human-machine interface (HMI) offerings. We also engage in ongoing research in the area of affective engineering through industry-academia partnerships with a number of university research laboratories.

The aim of affective engineering is to translate the qualitative nature of the way humans feel into quantitative physical terms for application to product creation. One research project involved analyzing the relationship between words people use to express how they feel about something – good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant – and physical quantities used to design HMI devices, like travel, weight and torque. Other research underway looks to tie affective requirements to development by statistically quantifying, for example, how physical stimuli is converted into a physiological reaction when a switch is pressed, as well as the words people use to describe how they feel.

Alps Alpine’s aim is to take all this know-how we have accumulated over so many years and use it, along with new development techniques backed by such research, to create, with greater efficiency and accuracy, the ideal feel that customers are looking for.