Samsung is bringing the science of haptics to mobile phones. (Thanks to Usernomics for passing this along.)

Haptics recreates touch and texture artificially. If your kid has a "force-feedback" joystick on their computer game console, they're getting a taste of haptics. Northwestern, USC and MIT are among the universities doing research in the field. (The image is from USC.)

It's vital that something like haptics comes to mobiles because, in a hands-free environment, you can't depend on just sight and sound. Bringing other senses, like touch (or smell) into the mix allows for communication to happen invisibly.

It's also vital for haptics to come to mobiles because this is a huge (in terms of installed base) platform. If the coding and messaging can be delivered in this space, we're talking about billions of users. And we're talking about a universal language.

Samsung is hoping first to create something like emoticons -- a tickle, or a slap across the face -- that will be delivered from messages. The technology itself is called TouchSense, and comes from Immersion Corp. of San Jose. Immersion has coded versions of TouchSense for both ActiveX and Java. For more on developing with Immersion click here.

You can add TouchSense to a Web site, by the way. 4D Flash has licensed the software to create 8 sites, mostly in Thailand.

This Samsung effort may seem as frivolous as their previously-announced phone that you wave back-and-forth in order to send a message, or their phone with a 1.5 Gbyte hard drive in it. But it's not. What they're working toward is a sort of HTML for touch, and a mass market for touch-based products.

By moving in many different technology directions at once, Samsung hopes to gain a reputation as a technology leader, something that will help it sell more normal phones against such rivals as LG.