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Buttons That Morph Out of Your Touchscreen
kkleiner writes "Wouldn't it be awesome if our tablets and smartphones could have buttons that morphed out of the touchscreen, and then went away again when we didn't need them? It sounds like magic, but now it is reality. Created by Tactus Technology, a Fremont, California-based start-up, Tactus is a deformable layer that sits on top of a touchscreen sensor and display. 'The layer is about 0.75mm to 1mm thick, and at its top sits a deformable, clear layer 200 nm thick. Beneath the clear layer a fluid travels through micro-channels and is pushed up through tiny holes, deforming the clear layer to create buttons or shapes. The buttons or patterns remain for however long they are needed, just for a few seconds or for hours when you’re using your iPad to write that novel. And because the fluid is trapped inside the buttons, they can remain for however long without additional power consumption. They come or go pretty quickly, taking only a second to form or disappear.'"
Now this means when I break my phone I can't use the cracked screen anymore.
That is fucking amazing!!!
The author seems to think the buttons look "slick", but they look cheap and cheesy to me. A regular touch screen looks a whole hell of a lot better, in my opinion.
One of the things I like about current generation smart phones/tablets is that they're very resilient to scratching, using a hardened glass screen.
This looks like a soft rubbery layer on top, so my guess is that it would be quite vulnerable to scratching and tearing.
Assuming that it could also be used to display Braille, rhis tech could probably be rather useful for tablet computers and ebook readers for the blind.
A fixed key pattern? *Weak*
... unless they can come up with a way to raise them based on a fine grid array rather than fixed cell sizes. Then it would be a truly useful technology.
Until then, I am sure a company or two will see this useful for raising a telephone keypad above the rest of the display, for example. I don't see it as more finely-controlled than that, because the screens of different devices differ so much.
Unless it were made into a grid array, it could never be a standard. For long.
I'm having a hard time coming up with the problem this solves, outside of creating a braille touchscreen "keyboard". Obviously, the liquid needs to be transparent so you can see the touchscreen underneath, which means the buttons have to rely on icons displayed on the LCD to indicate what the button does. So, you can now have a raised button on top of an icon on a touchscreen. Please excuse me as I don't get too excited over this. This looks like a solution in search of a problem...
Not for me it won't. Try to imagine how tiring it will be to type on a non-mechanical keyboard with almost zero feedback. Also, note the resurgence of high-quality mechanical keyboards that have appeared in the last couple years that use high quality Cherry switches. Except for special applications, the standard keyboard isn't going anywhere when you need a large amount of text input.
If manufacturers are going to insist on touch screens in cars (and I really wish they wouldn't), then this could be useful. Phone? I'll buy one with a flippy-outy keyboard.
Started the video in TFA:
"For years, people believed the world was flat...".
Stop, close page. Great idea, ridiculous marketing.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple."
And now we can have nipples as the interface.
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BMO
Nope, can't think of anything ever going wrong with moving parts.
Obviously, this is where this new technology can REALLY be useful . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They seem to have addressed the issue of the third dimension, but that's only one part of what makes a button a button. Does it "click"? Is there tactile feedback? Or does a single 'brush' of a fingertip across a raised button trigger the interaction?
Buttons aren't just lumps. They're clickable, and they need to offer resistance and then "give way" in order to constitute touch feedback. I'm not seeing that here,
last i heard, using an iphone while you are blind is pretty annoying.
I was under the impression that Apple had already filed for a patent on this.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
But only in predetermined locations by the manufacturer.
Call me when they can make that button travel across the screen with a moving icon.
Also I really wonder how much added distortion to the visual display this adds. Notice they did not have any shots that would show you that you are looking through and can see all the spots where the buttons are. designed to be.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's the thing people forget about hardness is that it is a double edged sword. So they are right in their marketing that Gorilla Glass, and others like it, are very hard. So they are difficult to scratch and so on. Sounds strong... However what it really means is they are brittle. They have a higher failure point, but when they do fail they break pretty badly. For real strength, some flexibility, give, is what you actually want.
An area where you can see this is knives. Far and away most quality knives are steel, including those made for adverse environments. However a bit of research turns up that you can get advanced ceramic knives. They are much tougher, they don't need sharpening basically ever, and they are real easy to clean. Why then are these not the exclusive knives in all high end kitchens? For that matter, why aren't they the knives of choice whenever you can afford it (they are expensive)?
The reason is they are brittle, they don't bend. So they are "stronger" than steel in a sense, in that you put pressure on them that would cause a steel knife to flex and they hold fast. However you increase the pressure to a point and then they just fail, shatter, whereas the steel knife would still bend, and then come back. So they are brilliant for cutting vegetables, meats with no bones, and so on but they aren't going to replace your carving knife.
Same shit with phone screens. Ya the move from plastic to glass means that they are more resistant to minor scratches. However hard impacts, a proper plastic will do a better job of handling.
Oh, that's right, this was posted on /. a few years ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/04/29/1516231/a-touch-screen-with-morphing-buttons
Heh, same thing was reported on by the same site as the current FA: http://singularityhub.com/2009/08/20/a-flexible-touch-screen-changes-surface-to-match-display/
It sounds like a great way to add cost to your smart phone.
They don't mention what the flexible layer is, but that it is 200nm thick. For comparison your regular plastic wrap is 11um thick. That's over 50 times thicker than the layer they're putting on the screen. So lets assume it's something stronger than polypropylene. Aluminum would not be transparent (except in Star Trek), but thinking from a strength point of view the foil in your house is probably a little thicker than the plastic wrap, so lets go with the same 50x thicker than the film on these displays. Now imagine a little fluid filled bubble of aluminum foil 50x thinner than what we're used to, and think how long it is likely to last as a button on an electronic gadget.
The only hope I can imagine is if they're using something like this which is stronger than kevlar. But without any information on the strength of this thing I have to remain skeptical.
I don't want to wait 2 seconds between each interface change on my phone. 1 second to release the current buttons. 1 second for new buttons to form. I'm sure it's all very glorious and cool the first time you see it. It's probably agonizingly boring every time thereafter.
Seems like a perfect way to get people to adopt phones like the iPhone, even though it doesn't have a physical keyboard.
It's really sad that Apple crashed like they did when they launched it, but you know it's no big wonder when you consider that they entire industry warned them again and again that consumers would never adopt a phone that didn't have tactile feedback from a physical keyboard.
Ohh wait, the rest of the industry was wrong and Apple succeeded enourmesly and everyone else followed suit. People seem to be quite content with touchscreens, so this actually solves a by now quite outdated problem that never really materialized.
I'll be so glad to be able to feel the buttons again when driving... much safer and more covert
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
Hi guys, welcome to 2009, only it's done with air instead of fluid.
Which genius thought liquids built into electronics was a good fucking idea?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's about tactile feedback: look at the "mixing desk" flavor in the animation cycle on their front page...
I suggested something like this back in 2009 when I saw '10 gui', I thinking: pick up where haptic displays (the ones that braile users use) left off, most especially multi-display situations where one or other display might serve largely as a control device with helpful visual feedback when you need to look at it: http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/touchy-feely-10gui/
On a phone: you finish typing your text message and the device drops back to music player mode; the buttons morph into volume slider, play/pause/fwd/etc.
And wouldn't it be nice if you had a tactile guide to where to put your thumb to take a picture when using the phone as a camera - better yet, where NOT to put your thumb while trying to get the shot ;)
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
The Senseg tactile display uses electrostatics to create the sensation of texture on a touchscreen.
With some improvements, I suppose this could be developed into an e-reader for the blind. Braille on the go!
Maybe now we can have realistic looking morphing license plates.
Let those red light cameras, meter maids, and automated license plate readers be damned.
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Good luck with that, there are very few smart phones left with slide/flip out keyboards, and fewer by the day.
I have tried to type on touch screens, and yes, I can do some typing if I absolutely have to, but never at the speed or accuracy that I can do on a slide out keyboard.
Maybe this invention will fix that (though really, a better solution would be to not abandon the physical keyboards in the first place!)
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Sent from my Motorola XT860 with slide out keyboard
I have an HTC Desire Z and I'm keeping it ;) Touch screens suck for typing anything longer than a phone number.
This is an attempt to solve a very real problem. Touch screens are horribly inefficient input devices. Ever study someone using a 10-key pad, and compared their productivity to someone using a touch screen? It's not even a contest.
That said, I don't think this product will help enough.
John
"Every third-party application examined by these users was worthy of criticism ranging from “this one thing is annoying” to “the whole thing is completely unusable.”"
Maybe I don't understand something, but why would anybody need such buttons?