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COMPANY
InterAction Laboratories was founded by Greg Merril and Phil Feldman in March, 2002.
The Company develops computer interface technologies for immersive physical interactions that people usually only experience in the real world. The focus is on adding resistance and mass to virtual objects in video games, military simulations and other digital content.
Interaction Lab’s is an emerging company and is already having an impact in a variety of markets—
Video Games
: With the success of Nintendo’s Wii, Konami’s DDR, Activision’s Guitar Hero, Sony’s EyeToy and others, the ‘active game’ segment will exceed $2 billion this year. The 2006 CES Innovation of the Year is the Interaction Laboratories’ Exer-station controller. Exer-station engages the player’s core muscles to play any off-the-shelf game on a PlayStation, Xbox, or PC. Exer-station has been licensed to Teknik Digital Arts for a planned for market launch in 2008.
Military Training: The Company’s PowerSquad™ Leg Joystick is used to enhance urban combat training by requiring soldiers to use their leg muscles to simulate walking and running in computer-based training scenarios. PowerSquad Leg Joystick is already the most widely deployed locomotion interface device in the estimated $8 billion military simulation market.
Commercial Fitness: Computer interactive products are a fast growing segment of the commercial fitness equipment market. IA-Labs has an international ISPO BrandNew award-winning product in this market - the Exer-station PRO. Exer-station PRO is the only video game product that provides resistance-based exercise. Over 1,000 Exer-station PRO systems have been sold to customers including YMCA and Gold’s Gym. The video game generation is now being enticed into fitness -- many for the first time.
Toys: With the increasing awareness of the obesity epidemic, there is a trend toward toys that integrate fitness with fun. Interaction Labs technologies are a key element of several planned toy lines.
Coin-op Arcade Machines: Interaction Lab’s force sensor technology provides a compelling new way of interacting with coin-operated amusements.
Rehabilitation: Interaction Lab’s devices integrate the fun of video games with serious isometric resistance therapy.
On-line Social Networks: A major trend in social networking is avatar-based social environments. Interaction Lab’s technology enables members to physically interact with each other.
Management:
Greg Merril -CEO
20 years of entrepreneurial leadership. Founder (1987) and former CEO and Chairman of HT Medical Systems, Inc. (now Immersion Medical) -- recognized as one of Maryland¹s fastest growing technology firms for four consecutive years (1996, 1997, 1998, 1999). In 1997 Deloitte & Touche recognized HT Medical as one of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in the USA. Operations at the company included seventy people focused on award-winning design, manufacturing, sales, and support of simulation-based medical
training systems. Mr. Merril oversaw the implementation of a direct marketing and sales force in the US and Europe and distributor relationships in Asia and South America. In 1996, for his work in medical simulation, Greg Merril was designated a "Hero of the Information Age" by the Smithsonian Institution and his success story was selected to be part of the National
Museum of American History's permanent research collection on Innovation in Information Technology. In July 2000, Mr. Merril led HT Medical through a $42M merger with Immersion (NASDAQ: IMMR).
Mr. Merril provides guest lectures in business and product development for the MBA programs at George Washington University, The University of Maryland, and The Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Merril¹s industry work includes publications and he has delivered over fifty invited lectures and keynote addresses covering business development, virtual reality, and
medical technology. He has served as guest editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE Special Issue on Virtual and Augmented Reality in Medicine. He is an award winning video and interactive-media producer/director and is a three time Greater Washington Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist (2000, 2001, and 2007).
Sports Background:
TENNIS: Greg began his professional life as a tennis pro at Bethesda Maryland’s Landon Tennis club. He was the #1 player while at Western Maryland College and a member of the 1983 US Junior Team, playing amateur and ATP satellite tournaments in Europe.
Motorsports: Greg started competitive sports car driving in 1993. In January 2000 Greg Merril drove a Porsche RSR for G&W Motorsports to a podium finish at the Rolex24 at Daytona. In 2002 he competed in the Speed Channel GT World Challenge Series. Greg has put his professional driving on hold to focus on InterAction Labs, Inc.
CYCLING:Greg is an enthusiast amateur road racer.
Phil Feldman -CTO
I'm one of the last of the boomers. Born in 1960, I grew up in a world with no electronics to speak of. No beeps, no LEDs, one black and white TV with rabbit ears, and you went to the library to look stuff up. My ?dad got into computers early though, and I remember being taken for a drive out to some facility where he was doing some work. My sister and I played with punch-card machines and we got to press the button on the building-sized machine that swallowed up a stack of cards that my dad had brought. It turns out that it was the switch to run a batch job on STRETCH, the largest computer in the world at the time.
Fast forward to 1978, I'm in a video game arcade, playing Robotron, my favorite game at the time, which I've gotten good enough to play for as long as I want to on a quarter. Of course, when I get off, both arms are shaking and I'm drenched with sweat. "This would make a good workout" I think to myself. I even go as far as building a giant wooden joystick in the basement with three automobile shock absorbers to dampen it, and contact switches for up/down and left/right. I wanted to hook it up to an arcade box but never could convince someone to let me do that.
In college, I got deeply into filmmaking, animation and special effects. I graduated with a degree in filmmaking and a good working knowledge of engineering and computer programming. You can't get a job in the motion picture business in Maryland, but there is a lot of Department of Defense work in the area, and I got a job running an animation stand that was part of an effort to convert paper maps to video disks. There were lots of computers around, so I picked up Pascal and C/C++. I also got involved enough with the rest of the film effects industry that I was able to land a job with R. Greenberg and Associates, a special effects house in NYC. After about a year of burning myself out making commercials and some FX work for features, I wound up back in the DC area working on a tank simulator. A new company called Silicon Graphics was making machines that could do 3D graphics in REAL TIME, and we were going to try to make the world's first simulator that used off-the-shelf parts. It worked, and you can now go to your local National Guard and check out AMFIST, if they have any M1 tanks lying around.
From that point, I did a lot of simulation work - submarines, modeling the US Postal System, landing craft, medical simulators, and research sims for modeling epidemics, civil violence and the co-evolution of weapons and aggression (my thesis). Along the way, I also got deep into road cycling. In the winter of 1996, the weather was so bad that you really couldn't ride much. I was going nuts from withdrawal, grinding out 30 minutes on a StairMaster when I thought about making something a little more fun to work out on. So I grabbed one of the old SGIs, got together with one of my friends who builds bikes and built a human-powered flight simulator. It was fun, gave me a good workout, and got me through the winter. I use a version of that machine to this day whenever the weather turns awful.
Over the years, I've tried to get people interested in making my machine a product, but the thing requires too much development to be viable. But there are all these off-the-shelf videogames, and starting with the Atari Jaguar, I've been trying to connect devices in ways that make sense. And one day it struck me that if I measured force rather than motion, then twitch games could be played using the large muscles of the body. It wouldn't be a cardio workout like my flight simulator, but it might be interesting. So I started to play with prototypes, and learned a lot about embedded processors and sensors. Nobody liked the first versions, but as I progressed and streamlined the system, things started to really click.
You know how when you're playing a game that uses a controller of some kind, and after a while you realize that you're holding it in a death grip. I think that has to do with the fact that we're engaged mentally in a big fight-or-flight scenario, or brain is dumping all these chemicals into our bodies, and our muscles don't know what to do. Our brain is saying "kill the mammoth!" but the only part of our body that can do anything is our thumbs. The rest of our body is left out in the cold. But when you're pushing AS HARD AS YOU CAN using EVERY MUSCLE on a force stick, the reptile part of your brain suddenly understands what's going on. Suddenly the game seems much more real, more immersive. That was cool. That's why we developed the Exer-station. Because exercise for exercise sake is painfully dull. But the combination of gaming and effort is Sport, it it's purest definition - Fun Effort.
Jason Grimm -Chief Product Officer
Jason Grimm was born in the late seventies, coinciding with the birth of the personal computer, dawn of the information age and death of disco. Mr. Grimm is a native Baltimorean who has spent much of his life soaking up the warm, special kind of radiation that only a television CRT can provide. Rarely will you find him in front of said television without a video game controller in hand.
After logging tens of thousands of video gaming hours (over a couple of decades), Mr. Grimm decided to pursue a career in the game industry. He got his start, and made his first mark, as Product Developer for the world renowned InterAct Accessories Corporation whose primary product was a game enhancement device known as the “GameShark”. Grimm lead development on some of the company’s most successful product lines for Playstation 1 & 2, Xbox and Gamecube. After leaving InterAct in 2003, Mr. Grimm founded a video game accessory’s company called Elite Interactive Inc. Known simply as EI, Elite Interactive immediately became nationally recognized as a company “by gamers, for gamers”. Critically acclaimed product successes such as the Katana controller (for PS2) and BFM-9000 LCD display (for all systems) helped to cement EI’s reputation as a top-tier, tournament caliber video game peripheral company.
One day Mr. Grimm was invited to test a prototype of InterAction Labs' revolutionary new fitness/video game crossover product- the Exer-station. He was highly skeptical of this contraption, but it took a mere 15 seconds of use before Grimm was stunned beyond the capacity for rational thought. Today, Grimm's life is dedicated to marketing, evangelizing and using all IA-Labs products.
Sports Background:
SCUBA: Grimm is a PADI certified Rescue Diver. His dive book contains logs from Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Bermuda, Bahamas, St. Thomas, Cozumel and countless other locales.
DISC GOLF: Jason is an avid Disc Golfer and slings only Champion Innova discs.
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