07 November 2007

The Fifth Senses - The Sense of Touch

Yes, there is undoubtedly a huge problem with the touchscreen devices including “mighty” iPhone, the lack of stimulus for the sense of touch, when you touch it, it doesn’t touch you back and therefore most of us still prefer the good old buttons instead of the piece of the flat and cold glass.

We are using our hands and sense of touch in exploring environments that have poor or no visibility and to deal with things that are right in front of us.

For instance, divers in murky water use their haptic senses in substitution for their visual senses with little loss in performance.

Without fifth sense and tactile feedback its hard to deal with world around us and especially with a mobile devices, based on my personal experience its hard to orient yourself and control the interface without seeing it, actually for me it is nearly impossible?

Because of the all mentioned Finnish giant has decide to go step further and develop technology that will offer a much more than the vibrations and click sounds, the upcoming S60 touch interface from Nokia promises a real button-like response enabled with the two small piezo sensor pads under the screen that provides a "0.1mm movement in the screen itself with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as with a conventional keyboard.

Anyway, guys over at The Red Ferret were lucky enough to test this technology in on a hacked N770 Internet tablet provided by the Roope Takala, Senior Program Manager at Nokia’s research labs.

“The basic technology is not that difficult,” he explained, “We inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of pressing a real key.”

The problem in perfecting the tech – codenamed Haptikos, meaning ‘to touch’ – lies in how our fingers experience a key press. We actually feel two movements, in and out, and these movements and the associated audio have to be perfectly attuned to the speed and responsiveness of a real keyboard. In use, the touch feedback on the demo device was near on perfect. Each press of a key returned a clunky click and tactile snap on the touchscreen, which made typing feel incredibly responsive and very usable on the smooth screen surface. In fact it was hard to remember that you were using a touchscreen keyboard.

“Funnily enough, although you think you’re typing faster than normal because of the feedback, in actual fact you’re not,” said Takala, “There’s just some sort of mental satisfaction that comes from typing with a tactile response.”

The new Haptikos technology will apparently be shipped with the upcoming Nokia S60 Touch phone that has been shown off at recent demos, and the team is busy working on the next challenge, which is to provide exact tactile replicas for scrolling and draw/paint programs. The problem is that while we expect and need ultra fast responses for keyboard use, navigation and things like drag scrolling require a different, slower response map, which is another hurdle for the engineers to overcome.

.:[ full article right here ]:.