Finally, a Touchscreen You Can Actually Feel!

Researchers in Switzerland working for Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, have developed a touch screen that allows the toucher to actually feel changes in the touch surface. In contrast to current touchpad's, which feels to the user as nothing more than fingertips on glass or plastic, the new touchpad allows the user to feel letters, words and even graphics as raised portions of the touchpad surface, allowing them to build images in the mind that correspond to the touched surfaces. In addition to helping blind people use computer or cell phones screens, the new technology could also be used to make games more interactive by adding yet another, more tactile sense.

The new touchscreen doesn't actually cause portions of the screen surface to be raised, it's just made to feel as if it does. This new technology created by a team of university staff and students uses a very thin see-through material that can be made to vibrate just a very tiny little bit over portions of the screen. This vibrating action causes the air above the surface to be riled up slightly, so it's the riled up air that feels like a tiny protuberance pushing out from behind the screen, allowing for the perception of touch. The vibrations are created by a microprocessor inside the computer that takes information sent to the display and converts it into signals that are sent to the thin material covering the screen which causes the raised feeling effect on whatever portion of the screen is necessary.

Also, because the vibrations are so slight, less than a micron in amplitude, the user isn't able to feel them at all, just the riled air.

For years, many computer users have been lamenting the dearth of innovation in interactive devices used with computers. The keyboard has been around since the computer was invented, and the mouse came along not much after. Since then, there have been improvements in game interactions with the introduction of the Wii and more recently the Kinect. Unfortunately, neither advancement has made it to the computer, where it might be argued, it's more desperately needed.

More recently, the introduction of touch-screens has been all the rage, particularly regarding touch pads and Smartphone's. But again, none of them really allow for much more than users were able to do with a mouse or keyboard. Now however, if this new kind of touch-screen pans out, we may finally be seeing a paradigm shift, that can hopefully allow users to interact in more tactile ways.