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Giving Touch-Screen Buttons Depth and Height With Pneumatics
blee37 writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrate 'popping out' touch screen buttons to become physical buttons using pneumatics. The idea is to combine the dynamic reconfigurability of touch screen buttons with the tactile feedback of real buttons. The technology could be applied where tactile feedback is currently lacking, such as in car navigation systems, ATMs, or cell phones."
This is a BAD idea for in-car SatNav/GPS.
Anything that might make drivers think they can set/adjust something by reaching and groping when they should be concentrating on driving will cause accidents.
So porn sites will be able to have interactive women in 3-d on touchscreens? SWEET!
so there are pistons within the cell phone of the future? batteries don't stand a chance. and then you have to oil your phone.
Touch screens are nice because they can be programmed to display whatever controls you wish, but isn't the lack of moving parts another advantage? This seems like it would have MTBF issues.
I think I speak for everyone on this site when I say that this is REALLY COOL. I kind of want to go work on making a dynamic version right now. The technology shown here is cool but the concept of a dynamic surface that can re-shape is a great one and something that would should work on. Can you imagine how much better your phone/monitor/keypad would be if you could re-shape it as you needed?
Just make buttons that have a touch screen on them, thus you still have the scroll-ability and versatility of a touch screen, combined with the tacticle feedback of buttons when you want things to function like a button...
Or am I completely missing the point?
I assumed I'd have issue with the touch keyboard on the iPhone. However, when I press a key, that key is highlighted and enlarges. I receive visual feedback of the key I pressed, even if I don't have physical feedback. Yes, it requires I look when I text, but I can't imagine many scenarios where I'd really ever text without looking just because there was some physical feedback.
I'll take the lack of moving parts over the physical feedback, especially given how often I've dropped my phone.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Establish a grid of button surfaces, kind of like pixels, which can be dynamically re-grouped to merge them into larger buttons, and then put the display on that.
So, imagine you had a keyboard with essentially no gaps between the keys, and a screen on top of them. You could make one button out of qwe, one button out of tgyh, etc., while displaying your graphics seamlessly.
Or you could just do what ATMs have already been doing for ages, which is have blank buttons beside the screen and add the labels. But nooo, gotta be all fancy-like...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I could swear I read about this on /. several months ago... at the very least, this story is OLD. Looks like some blogger just rehashed it from back in April (link is not /., obviously).
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/28/carnegie-mellon-morphs-pop-up-buttons-onto-multi-touch-display
And what would be the actual pricetag of such a device? I understand that we use more and more electronics to simplify the mechanics behind our devices. Now, with a pump, you need to physically inject air under the screen, so you have moving parts, and they are usually costly... besides, what would be the reliability of such a thing? and could you get a "flat" screen?
I am left thinking "so what?". All they did was PROJECT graphics onto an inflatable surface, and used a camera and image recognition to determine which 'button' was being pressed.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe this as a 'touch screen'; the image is projected onto the surface (which could be true for ANY surface) and the surface itself does NOT detect touches. There is also no tactile feedback whatsoever. I might as well get one of those laser projection keyboards, set it up on the bonnet of my car and announce that I've made a "self-propelling air-conditioned touchscreen that seats four".
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
An unavoidable limitation is that the mask itself is static, meaning that new shapes cannot be created dynamically. The technology only allows controlling whether the shapes pop in, pop out, or remain flat.
That makes it useless for all but a few uncommon use cases. But it may be the beginning of something, maybe another team will come up on a way to create a programmable mask.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Whack-a-mole! Now with a digital display and tactile feedback! imagine the possibilities!
Weren't touch-screens the latest rage because.. you didn't have to.. push... buttons?
"Nipples"
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I thought people were already trying to do this sort of thing using electroactive polymers. Certainly there seems to be a couple patents on the idea, not to mention someone who thinks the technology could be used to make braille-capable touchscreens.
The killer app for this will of course be a Timex Sinclair 1000 emulator.
or are you just happy to see me?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
and their exploding work stations.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Immersion Corporation is a small technology company that is also providing haptic (touch) feedback for a variety of electronics, including touch screens. They have the technology to make a flat button on a touch screen feel like it is a 3-dimensional button being depressed and it isn't confined to a single configuration. Lg, Samsung, and Nokia already license Immersion's technology and mobile phones with touch feedback are already being sold in Asia. In my opinion, this latex button is a good idea but it won't catch on.
I periodically read about demos of this technology using pneumatics, but it seems like a very limiting way to do it. The article says:
all the buttons must popped in or out at once...new shapes cannot be created dynamically
For this to ever become in general use, we need something pixel-addressable. Seems like something that is piezoelectric or electrostatic is more likely to be successful that pneumatics.
I like the question posed in the article:
When do you think pneumatic technology like this will turn the flat touch screen buttons on our phones into physical buttons?
1. 2 years
2. 5 years
3. 10+ years
4. Never
Probably never. Had they asked "when will haptic technology turn the flat touch screen buttons..." instead of asking about the specific technology, then the answer would be different.
The other big limitation of any haptics approach is that most touch screen surfaces are glass, for durability. Sitting next to me I have 4 touch screens, each with a different techology: resistive, capacitive, acoustic wave, and acoustic pulse recognition. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, but I don't think any of these screens could be altered to support haptics. Since they are used in restaurants and medical systems, they must be durable and sealed. So there is definitely much more research involved in this other than hacking a cheesy pneumatic system into a touch screen and asking "when will this will take over the world?"
instead of the cell phone filling the buttons with air, the owner of the phone should have to blow his cell phone up to use it. with a breathalyzer installed in the cell phone, the phone would be disabled from making calls, which would end the "i'm drunk so i'm calling my ex" phenomenon.
Wouldn't it be easier to just add a piezoelectric layer to the screen and add haptic feedback that way?
I feel like there is some sort of pertinent pizza-based analogy here... something about how when the crust has larger bubbles, it's a more rich and textural experience... I'm not sure though, as pizza-based analogies aren't really my expertise...
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Sounds like the BlackBerry Storm... but on a whole new level.
This reminds me of that bizarre "Transformer blob" video that was reported here some time ago. I dunno if I want my touchscreens morphing on me when I'm not looking!
So... first they struggled to create touch Screens so they can eliminate buttons altogether, and now they struggle to implement buttons on touch screens? Wow, well thought out!
Although I agree that it would look cool and geeky, I do wonder what's wrong with buttons/keys featuring an OLED screen at the top. I know it wouldn't be such a versatile solution, but nevertheless it doesn't have to be implemented on a large scale.
Seems to me like it's, again, proof of concept rather that something useful in the long term.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
This would be extremely effective in making touchscreen interfaces usable for the blind.
i cant stand the touchscreen interface...its a relic that persists because we are too lazy or stupid to grasp abstract concepts presented to us in the start of the 21st century. We still want to shake, poke, bump, and twist our interfaces to make them do what we want. Its just one more way to dumb-down information and technology as opposed to addressing the real issue: education.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Okay, maybe not octopus skin -- but in it, we have an existence proof for a surface that can display high-bandwidth color changes and slower, but quite elaborate, texture changes. With all the progress being made with microfluidics and chip-scale effectors, why on Earth would anyone pursue a chugging, hissing, thermodynamically-disadvantaged pneumatic system for this?
This summary has a bit more info in it, too
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/04/29/1516231/A-Touch-Screen-With-Morphing-Buttons
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
This sounds awfully familiar... Oh yeah, here.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
...and discarded it because the screen itself is not flexible enough for serious dynamics (e.g. the form that your keyboard keys have), or if you use a second surface above it that you fill with the air, you get optical distortions.
My current concept is much cooler: Put pins in every spot between 4 pixels (on the corners), and use small magnetic actuators (like speakers) behind the screen, to drive the pins up and down. then attach a flexible foil on the top of the pins. now you can create very nice, fast and detailed tactile surfaces.
If you want to develop this (I haven’t got the time for it, since I'm already trying to make some other inventions reality :), just mention that you got the idea from me and send me a free product with lifetime replacement guarantee, and we’re good. :) I just want to use it, tell everybody how cool it is (advertisement for you), and have made the world a bit better.
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... the obligatory Rule 34 implementation. Well, maybe not just see it ......
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem I see here is that you've now got a touch screen that is custom built for a specific, single-screen (or possibly dual-screen, since buttons can be concave or convex) application. If you've looked at a restaurant console, there's multiple screens- not just one, so for each different application, there needs to be a different screen. One to show the tables in the restaurant, one to place a kitchen order, one to place a bar order, one to generate the bill, and so on. The advantage of the touch screen is that you can have the single monitor become a custom interface for any application. It would seem to me that this air-bubble system removes that, unless there's cards that can be removed an inserted to provide the alternate interfaces in a single device. Seems a little too cumbersome and rigid to be functional at this point. If it was something that could be built to represent each individual pixel on the screen, so that the monitor could become a dynamically configurable device, as with the current touch screens, then it might potentially have some usability.
I was really hoping this was going to be a fully programmable system that would allow a programmer to dynamically elevate arbitrary parts of the screen, but it seems to be completely static, so I don't really see the point. Ultimately, what I think people would want for devices like an iPhone would be to have fully dynamic "buttons" that are programmed using the windowing/widget API so that you maintain the application-specific dynamic UI that makes devices like the iPhone awesome while adding the tactile feedback that so many people seem to enjoy. I think the requisite of a pneumatic or hydraulic pumping system would make it extremely difficult to get something like this into a small package, though. Maybe there's a material that will expand suitably from electrical stimulation rather than pneumatics.
A microwave that works shockingly? Now that's what I call killer.
Don't resistive TSs have "feedback" in the form of the two layers touching?
is how amazing if a bubble-wrap app was made with these buttons. (drools at thought of infinite bubble wrap)
We've seen this story before. Even has some of the same pictures. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/1516231
In how many scenarios will a piston/compressor driven air-filled system that can't be dynamically configured to show different elements be useful?(the only 'pop out' you'll ever have on your Pneumatic phone is for the numeric keypad, for instance) And this is without even going into the bulkiness and battery life issues.