William Provancher wants you to get a grip. His startup, Tactical Haptics, is launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund small-scale production of a new kind of touch feedback game controller, dubbed Reactive Grip.
Reactive Grip gives you feedback in both hands.
The Reactive Grip gives you much sharper sensations than the aging “rumble” game controllers with haptics, or touch feedback, from companies such as Immersion. I was able to demo the device, and the grip really does give you quite a bit of force feedback. It shows you how it feels to stab at a body with a sword, shoot a gun, fire a slingshot, or ride a dune buggy. It’s one of those experimental technologies that you have to feel to understand.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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