Tactus technology. :: Tactus Technology :: Tactus' Morphing Keyboard. Tactus' Morphing Keyboard. Tactus Morphing Touchscreen Keyboard New Technology. Acer Iconia Notebook Dual Touchscreen's Keyboard Review) Idea Storm. Apple's latest patent grab looks like they might move to haptic feedback, reshapes your touchscreen. If we were to go off of the patent pictured below, it looks as though Apple haver finally found the perfect way to solve the issue with touchscreen keyboards discarding the physical keyboard in favor of this new technology.
Haptic technology would allow touchscreen manufacturers to deliver physical feedback when a user touches a button, tries to type on the devices on-screen keyboard, or just interacts in general with the screen. No physical keyboard plus haptic technology could be the perfect middle ground. The current haptics on most smartphones are nothing but a quick vibration, and not a full solution. Apple's way seems to use a combination of flexible OLED display technology and piezoelectric actuators that would, wait for it, actually alter the contour of your screen. This technology would take into account sensor data to determine usage context, providing situationally-appropriate feedback. Are Keyboards on Laptops the Next Thing to Go? The one thing that differentiates a laptop from a tablet – a keyboard – could be on its way to the dustbin of history, contends long-time Mac columnist Andy Ihnatko. If you don’t believe him, witness Exhibit A in the war on a technology first perfected more than a hundred and thirty years ago: The haptic display.
Apple patented their own version of a haptic display that shows – what else – a full-size keyboard. The general idea is that it should be possible to use tiny vibrating motors to fool fingers into thinking that they’re touching a physical keyboard. Working prototypes designed for mobile phones already exist, like Immersion’s TouchSense technology. A laptop with a fully virtual keyboard would resemble what’s known as a folio computer. Acer’s got at least one thing right, however: replacing a keyboard with a fully virtual interface allows you to change control modalities as easily as you switch desktop backgrounds. Touchscreens killed the keyboard. Thanks to a handful of emerging technologies, virtual touchscreen keyboards are getting closer to the feel of real electromechanical keyboards.
Enhancements such as tactile feedback and surfaces that change to mimic physical keys could eventually redefine the virtual keyboard experience for millions of users of devices ranging from smartphones to tablets and touchscreen PCs. Will these improvements be enough for the virtual keyboard to entirely displace the electromechanical keyboard? Maybe not for folks old enough to have used an IBM Selectric typewriter, whose keyboard served as the model for early computer keyboards, but improved virtual keyboards may be just fine with a new generation of users for whom big clunky keyboards are so yesterday. On smartphones, virtual keyboards have largely replaced the more expensive electromechanical keyboards, with a few notable exceptions such as BlackBerries and QWERTY texting phones.
The real battleground may be over tablet computers. Haptic display/keyboard uses microfluidics to create buttons when needed. June 08, 2012 // Nicolas Mokhoff A haptic user Interface with real physical buttons, guidelines, or shapes that rise out of the surface of any touchscreen and recede to become invisible is being demonstrated at this week’s SID event. Tactus Technology claims its Tactile Layer panel is the world's first deformable tactile surface that creates dynamic physical buttons that users can actually see and feel in advance of entering data into the device. Tactus uses innovative microfluidic technology to create physical buttons that rise from the touchscreen to give users the experience of operating a physical keyboard.
When no longer needed, the buttons recede back into the touchscreen, leaving no trace of their presence. The Tactile Layer panel is a completely flat, transparent, dynamic surface that adds no extra thickness to the standard touchscreen display since it replaces a layer of the already existing display stack. All news Displays & Interfaces.