Equate digital and physical ink to enable more productive and delightful pen input.

Endow digital touch interactions with the immediacy and clarity of direct manipulation in the physical world.

Create an anatomically accurate, low-latency 3D model of a user’s hands, grasp, and forearms from sensor input for use in VR, AR, and traditional computing experiences.

Tactual’s Reflex Ink™ SDK family makes digital ink a more realistic alternative to physical ink by dramatically boosting digital ink’s perceived accuracy and response. Reflex Ink v1™ reduces at least 8-10ms or more than 40% of the roughly 20ms of driver, OS framework, application, and rendering software latency left in today’s leading operating systems. The end result is more precise pen content creation experiences where the digital ink stroke is a few precious millimeters closer to the pen tip.

Reflex Ink v1™ is available today and sold as a standalone SDK to eliminate software input latency on third-party digital pen solutions, but it was built from the ground-up to work best with the ultra-high-performance, kHz-class sample-rates, and sub-millisecond hardware latency of Tactual’s Prism sensor line.

Launching in 1H’2017, Reflex Ink v2 SDK makes digital ink a realistic alternative to physical ink for the first time by dramatically boosting digital ink’s perceived response. Purely through software, the second generation of Reflex Ink can eliminate all perceived delays from the moment of user input to ink response.

Tactual and third-party scientific research shows that current touch and pen devices have end-to-end latencies between 60 - 200ms. Some components in the touch and ink input stack like Tactual’s Prism sensor finally offer <1ms almost instantaneous hardware sensing, but complete suppression of input-to-response latency from all sources in a general purpose computing device from sensor to driver to OS to application to usage bottlenecks will never be achieved. And Tactual researchers have proven that even very small input-to-response latencies are noticeable by average people when they directly interact with digital content with their fingers or a pen. In fact, our studies show that human beings can detect roundtrip input latencies as low as 2ms and that dragging, scrolling, and inking productivity declines for users when input-to-response latencies are greater than 10ms perceptual limit for most users.

Reflex Ink v2 brings perceived input-to-ink latency beneath this 10ms perceptual barrier through a basket of multi-faceted software technologies. Reflex Ink v2 is sold as a standalone SDK to eliminate perceived inking latency on third-party digital pen solutions, but it was built from the ground-up to work best with Prism’s superior hardware sensing performance.

Available in 1H’2017, Tactual’s Reflex Touch v1™ SDK endows digital touch interactions with more physical immediacy and clarity, purely through software. Reflex Touch v1™ SDK reduces up to 32ms of the driver, OS framework, application, and rendering software touch latency left in today’s leading operating systems.

The end result is more realistic and precise tap, drag, and scrolling response to touch input in infotainment and gaming usage. More specifically, with Reflex Touch v1™, scrolling through menus, lists, and web pages will be swifter and more stuck to your fingertips. Your smart device will respond more immediately to every tap you make. A dragged cursor or icon will more quickly and accurately track the fingertip commanding them onscreen. And mobile gamers will enjoy a noticeable leap in command response that can make the difference between winning and losing--and even enable new, otherwise impractical, mobile twitch gaming mechanics.

Available in 1H’2017, Tactual’s Reflex Mirror v1™ SDK reconstructs a near real-time 3D model of a user’s hands, grasp, and forearms when in contact or near contact with a free-form Prism sensor surface.

On Prism-powered™ smart objects, Reflex Mirror v1™ allows users to bring their real fingers, hands, and grasp from the physical into digital VR and AR worlds. Mirroring a user’s hands and forearms between the physical and digital environment enables more natural interaction with 3D digital content and meaningfully enhances immersion.

Understanding the way a user grasps a physical controller also improves the realism of digital physics during AR, VR, and conventional 2D gaming experiences. For instance, swinging a ping-pong racket with a “chinese-style’ grip should put a very different spin on the ball then when performing an identical swing with a more classical “shakehands” grip.

In both AR and VR, having an accurate, low-latency understanding of finger, hand, and forearm position relative to the surface of a smart object also enables digital 2D and 3D user-interface elements to be accurately mapped anywhere on the surface of a Prism™ smart device or input controller. Simply put, Reflex Mirror v1™ and Prism™ work together to turn every surface of a physical object into a truly multi-dimensional display that makes every button, control, and curve of its casing into a rich gestural input surface capable of immediate visual and 3D haptic feedback.

From a smartphone to a whiteboard to a gaming controller, understanding how an input device is being held at any given moment or is being approached with the hand / fingers prior to the moment of contact also enables breakthrough dynamic user interfaces that better anticipate true user intent, ensure UI controls are always in easy reach, and are positioned to avoid accidental input.