You may not have heard of , but you've probably used their technology. Immersion licenses its designs to product makers, both in medical and consumer industries. Their medical-industry partners make robots and equipment for minimally invasive surgery. The haptics provide surgeons with tactile feedback that makes the advanced surgery possible.

In the consumer space, the company's technology shows up in gaming controllers, car dashboards, GPS gadgets, media players and, most frequently, all kinds of cell phones. Immersion claims that 70 million cell phones contain the company's haptics technology.

Immersion CTO Christophe Ramstein demonstrated today at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference a breathtaking new generation of haptic technologies he calls "high-fidelity haptics."

Ramstein called a volunteer onto the stage and invited her to play a pinball game on a specially configured Hewlett-Packard tablet PC. She immediately responded to the haptics, and said that she could actually "feel a metal ball rolling on a hard surface." She could feel all the motion of the game, the vibration of the whole machine and detailed, super-realistic but subtle tactile cues of the kind that you would feel with a real, physical pinball machine.