About Us

General Vibration is an award-winning technology company founded as Coactive Drive Corporation in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1999 near the MIT campus. The company was rebranded as General Vibration Corporation in 2014 and is now located in San Francisco, California to be near Silicon Valley.

The company has a small team of dedicated engineers and scientists with academic backgrounds and professional expertise in Mechanical Engineering, Dynamics and Control, Physics, Mathematical Modeling, Computer Science and Haptics.

Over the years we have been granted more than 20 patents in the United States, Asia and Europe. We have other patents pending.

We set our own goals for improving the foundation of haptics, and we have solved many important sub-problems. We are excited about the haptic industry's transition from single actuator haptics to haptic arrays, for which we are at the forefront.

1999

We began by developing a novel force feedback joystick for the consumer and industrial markets, that could be both low-cost and high fidelity. We licensed our innovative force feedback technology to a leading Silicon Valley company.

2005

In 2005 we shifted our attention from force feedback to synchronized vibration of inexpensive eccentric rotating mass vibration motors, commonly found in game controllers and mobile phones. 

In 2005 we also developed our own linear actuators based on magnetic springs and conventional springs and integrated those into experimental prototype game controllers in a custom project for Sony PlayStation to demonstrate next generation haptics. We have patents on our inventions related to linear actuators, both individually and when synchronized together.

2012

We introduced our SAVANT architecture, which is an enormously powerful and exciting advance in haptics. Our view is that SAVANT shows how to network haptic actuators together, just as the internet shows how to network computers together.

SAVANT is an acronym which stands for "Synchronized Array of Vibration Actuators in a Network Topology."

2017

In May 2017, Sony Interactive Entertainment (the PlayStation business) licensed more of our haptics intellectual property portfolio, including the work we did in 2005 with the original haptic game controller prototypes, and our SAVANT haptic architecture.

2020

In November 2020, the Sony PS5 was launched with the Sony DualSense Wireless Controller, raising the industry's bar for game controller haptics.

2021

In October 2021, General Vibration is presented a prestigious Wolfram Innovation Award from Wolfram, Inc. the makers of Mathematica, for GV's innovations. Wolfram makes the Wolfram Language and GV uses it for design and analysis, including the Inertia Tensor analysis for its haptic arrays.

2022 

In March 2022, the PS5 Dualsense Wins BAFTA Best Controller Ever Tournament.

In November 2022, PlayStation begins to accept orders for the PSVR2 system, which will include the new Sense controllers with the same innovative haptics as in the Dualsense.

2023

In August 2023, PlayStation launched the PlayStation Portal, the remote play handheld for the PS5. PS Portal is built using the same technology as the DualSense controller and it has the same haptic feedback features and adaptive trigger functionality.