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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