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Touchscreen Touches You Back
A prototype screen with dynamically changeable physical buttons on a visual display has been created by Carnegie Mellon researchers. The device uses a latex overlay on top of a touchscreen to create a tactile surface.
The following video tells the story.
(Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display video)
The system does not have quite as much flexibility as a standard touchscreen, since the shapes of the tactile portion must be decided in advance and are part of the hardware.
See Tactile 'Display' For Fingertips and the Gel Tactile Display for variations on this idea.
SF writers have thought about the idea of adding tactile capabilities to devices that ordinarily do not have them. Frederik Pohl's Joymaker device has a tactile net capability.
More recently, Battlestar Galactica featured a Cylon datastream terminal with tactile qualities that was more flexible than the Carnegie Mellon design.
(Cylon datastream 'terminal')
Via Popular Science.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/22/2009)
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