Iranian of the Day

Xconomy: What’s the connection between hardcore, chest-pounding video game action and Niels Bohr’s interpretation of wave-particle duality? It’s an Iranian-American physicist-turned-entrepreneur named Shahriar Afshar. Five years after Afshar announced the results of one of the most controversial experiments in the recent history of physics—one suggesting that it is possible, contrary to Bohr’s long-accepted theory, to observe light behaving as both particles and waves at the same time—the Cambridge, MA-based startup he founded, Immerz (www.Immerz.com), is about to launch an “acousto-haptic” device that lets gamers both hear and feel gaming action at the same time. Immerz’s product, called Kor-fx, is essentially a pair of woofers for your chest cavity, designed to enhance the sense of being immersed in a game (or a movie or a song)—hence the company’s name. Immerz showed off the device for the first time last week at the i-stage competition in Phoenix, AZ, where the Consumer Electronics Association—the same organization that runs the giant CES convention in Las Vegas every January—chose it as one of the 11 most innovative consumer technology products shipping next year. The company plans to bring the product to market in the first quarter of 2010, focusing first on PC gamers, and later on console players >>>