Touch screen with feelings
Touch screen with feelings
“Technology like art is a climbing exercise of the human imagination.”
In this digital age, our fingers have accomplished to love touch screens. They provide an easy, emotional way to navigate our devices to make them do our bidding. But still, our fingers haven’t felt any love in return. All glass screens feel the same, they take, but as far as the tactile experience goes, they don’t give back. The closest way to get finger feedback with most touch screens today comes from mechanical actuators that vibrate the screen when your fingers touch it. You feel a minor vibration, but nothing more. But think touch screens could touch you back “your fingers actually feel what the screen shows”. The advancement in touch screen technology enhanced a device called Tactile Pattern Display, or TPaD. It can create the image of texture on an unadorned piece of glass.
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you are not side of the steamroller,
you’re part of the road.”
The 25-millimeter-diameter prototype takes advantage of the almost high coefficient of friction between human skin and glass. Glass is remarkably. You could think of it as being smooth, but the coefficient of friction between glass and your fingertip is about 1. But when the glass is vibrated ultrasonically, a cushion of air designs between your finger and its surface. The TPaD’s 1.6-mm-thick glass layer is set into ultrasonic oscillation by a piezoelectric ceramic disc interested to the glass. The amplitude of the oscillation can be controlled, reducing the coefficient of friction by up to a factor of 10. The higher the amplitude of oscillation, the lower the coefficient of friction.
“It has become appallingly obvious that
our technology has exceeded our humanity”.
When you run a finger across the TPaD, you get a very strong tactile emotion of something being there, like a bump, a dip, or an edge. To create the feeling that you are rubbing your finger against a file grating. The entire plate vibrates, so the amount of friction is the equal all over the TPaD’s surface at any given time. But because the oscillations are restrained as your finger’s position changes, the device fools you into thinking that there are varying amounts of friction at different locations. The prototype uses optical sensors to keep record of your finger’s position. The friction reduction can be switched on and off so quickly within 4 ms on average that the pitch of virtual bumps or dips can be made far finer than what a fingertip can discern.
“The art challenges the technology, and
the technology inspires the art”.
Another technical complication is limiting how much power the TPaD draws, which is hugely important in mobile devices, where your power budget is measured in milliwatts. In principle, the TPaD does not need a lot of power, but in practice, you run into issues like parasitic losses because of power being dissipated through things like mountings.
“The whole idea is not about the choice of using or not using technology.
The challenge is to use it right”.
M.Nasreen