The Immersion Desktop software supplied with the TouchSense mouse is called when the user interacts with standard Windows OS user interface elements such as icons, menu items, buttons, drop-down lists, and many others. By supplying touch feedback for user gestures, this software makes desktop objects feel much more like physical objects. For example, a window feels elastic when a user stretches or shrinks it. The items in menus feel like mechanical detents; the mouse provides a very positive sensation of "dropping into" each item, which in turn conveys a strong sense that the user has engaged the item. Scroll bars have the same sort of detent effect, making it very clear to a reading user that the mouse engaged the scroll bar and that a click will scroll the page. Unlike desktop sound effects, a TouchSense mouse can be silent, providing feedback to the user, but not to nearby colleagues.
Different people have different thresholds for feeling force. Different people have different preferences for how desktop controls should feel. Users may adjust the overall strength and feel of individual effects with the Immersion Desktop control panel.
Developers may associate specialized touch sensations with application-specific features by writing code. For example, a drawing application might deploy an invisible but tangible grid to enable regular object alignment without visual clutter. A word processing application might superimpose a texture over a block of text formatted in a particular style. An on-line presentation tool might give a speaker tactile presentation timing cues not seen or heard by the audience.
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