[access-uk] BBC News - Haptics brings a personal touch to technology.
- From: Colin r. Howard <colin@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: talkingcomputers1@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:39:46 +0100
Greetings,
Hope nobody else has posted this, seems quite interesting. aftere post from
my friend I paste in the text from the site.
From: "David Pardy" <pardy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 08:49:36 +0100
Interesting development which could prove useful for VIPs - Dave
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10373923.stm
Haptics brings a personal touch to technology By Michael Fitzpatrick
Page last updated at 11:04 GMT, Monday, 5 July 2010 12:04 UK
Tokyo, Japan
Touch screen has proved popular - but how about a computer that touches
back? When Aldous Huxley described the 'Feelies' of his 1930s satire Brave
New World he envisaged a world in which touch would be exploited by the
technology of the future as much as vision. How wrong he was.
Of all the senses, touch as been somewhat neglected as a human means of
interacting with machines.
Haptics - which could lead to people interacting with virtual objects using
a sense of touch or feel - means to change all that. Labs around the world
are now racing to close the gap while the first commercial applications are
hitting the market.
For the first time people will be actually be able to have a virtual feel of
some of the images that are placed before them.
Keeping in touch
A leading advocate of haptics is Russian scientist Doctor Ivan Poupyrev, now
a senior researcher at Disney Research Labs in Pittsburgh. He claims this
area is going to be "huge", particularly for hand held devices.
"We don't do enough with touch," said Dr Poupyrev.
"The basic goal of the technology we are developing at Disney is to create a
perception of texture - to let people 'feel' objects on screen by stroking
them with their fingers.
"We do this by applying a high voltage to a transparent electrode on the
glass plate - in this case people will feel a texture on the glass. By
varying the frequency and amplitude of the signal we can create different
sensations."
Continue reading the main story
Flexibility should take a further step and let people feel them, stretch
them, bend them and have them react to these interactions
Dr Ivan Poupyrev
Disney Research
The results can recreate the feeling of paper or a textile, simulate the
smoothness of glass and even the roughness of sand paper.
This work follows on from Dr Poupyrev's earlier research at the Sony labs in
Tokyo. The scientist and his team came up with a prototype touch screen for
a mobile phone that added a sense of touch in the form of tactile feedback.
"With devices getting smaller and increasingly mobile, I thought it was time
we exploited our sense of touch," he said.
"For a start we wanted to create what had never been achieved before - a
touch screen that really responded back when you touched it."
Dubbed "TouchEngine", tactile feedback is achieved using tiny bendable
strips of crystals known as actuators placed under a thin LCD screen that
pulsate slightly when the screen is touched.
It eventually led to a touch panel that generates tactile feedback and also
detects the amount of pressure applied to the panel.
If, for example, someone were to apply more pressure to the screen
displaying an icon the speed of switching between icons would intensify.
Bendable tech
However, being able to feel feedback though the fingertips from a hand-held
screen was just the start.
Ivan Poupyrev also teamed up with designers Carsten Schwesig and Eijiro Mori
to develop a bendable credit-card-sized device nicknamed Gummi. The card is
activated by the bending motion.
The prototype Gummi uses bendable organic light-emitting display (OLED)
technology. Sony claims to have created the world's most flexible OLED so
far - so thin and flexible that the colour display can be rolled around a
pencil while streaming video.
Maps or photo albums could be made from the bendable media cards Flexible
electronic paper is already on the market in the form of e-readers.
LG Display plans to launch mass-production of an 11.5-inch (29cm) flexible
e-paper display "in the near future". The market for more paper-like
displays will be substantial according to market researcher DisplaySearch.
Combining haptics with these bendable electronics could give rise to a whole
new generation of flexible devices, said Dr Poupyrev.
"[E-reader manufacturer] Plastic Logic has an e-reader where all the driving
electronics are built out of plastic transistors. Potentially, it could
allow for the creation of a completely flexible device."
The results could resemble the very malleable Gummi.
"Users can control the amount of bending very accurately," said Carsten
Schwesig.
"The Gummi GUI contains intuitive bending controls for tasks that exploit
this fact, such as zooming in and out of a map, controlling the playback
speed of media files and controlling the composition of image layers.
"More information can be displayed on the small screen in the absence of
buttons or additional menu hierarchies."
'Next level'
There are already some touch feedback devices in the shops, including
Samsung's Haptic phone with its vibrating screen that makes a tick motion
when the screen is touched, confirming that it has understood the user's
command.
Toshiba recently demoed its "New Sensation UI Solution," which uses E-sense
technology from Finnish company Senseg.
E-Sense can produce localised tactile feedback by controlling the electric
charge on a film affixed to the touch-panel.
It means users can feel different sensations such as touching wood, metal
and soft materials, says Toshiba.
Technologies such as these could take touchscreen technology - such as that
used in Apple's iPad - to the "next level", according to Dr Poupyrev.
"iPad allows people to touch virtual objects as though they were real," he
said
"Flexibility should take a further step and let people feel them, stretch
them, bend them and have them react to these interactions," he said.
From Colin Howard, who lives in a small place near Southampton and after a few
days, likes to change his signature as he thinks it gets boring!
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