Textured Tactile Touchscreens

HizookRobotics writes "A new covering developed by Senseg and Toshiba Information Systems gives touchpads, LCDs, and other curved surfaces (eg. cellphones) programmable texture using a high-resolution electrotactile array — a grid of electrodes that excite nerves in the skin with small pulses of current to trick the body into perceiving texture, pressure, or pin-pricks depending on the current amplitude and electrode resolution. The new covering has many potential applications: interactive gaming, touchscreens with texture, robot interfaces, etc."

Comments

This could let the blind use touchscreen devices

[AltairDusk]

It sounds like this could be used for a braille interface, I wonder if a braille interface that can change on the fly would ultimately be beneficial or prove confusing though...

Re:Keyboard

[darien.train]

I think that's actually one of the main uses you'll see as the technology rolls out. I've worked on designing a few methods of large scale (as in life-sized) multi-touch alpha-numeric input and the biggest issue I experience at the moment is ergonomics, not haptic feedback. It's really hard to have a screen positioned in a way that makes it easy to view content and easy to type on at the same time. The texture will help but until better form factors are developed we're not going to get any really decent soft QWERTY keyboards (input conventions themselves are a different story.)