Tactus Techology can give your favorite touchscreen buttons (via @jkhowland)

Elegance meet aesthetics

‘For years people believed that touch screens were flat. They were wrong’.

At SID Display Week 2012 in Boston this week, Tactus Technology is showing off its next-gen mobile tactile tech. The technology idea is simple: physical buttons rise out of the surface of a touchscreen.

The future of touch

I’ve read a number of articles that suggested that touch screens weren’t the next step. We’re adding elegance to our devices. A touch screen allows the user a simple, and beautiful experience. But design isn’t all two dimensional.

The next step is to allow that elegant experience, and yet add to it the joy of tactile feedback:

Essentially, Tactus has created a Tactile Layer component that generates a haptic user interface (UI) with real physical buttons, guidelines, and shapes which rise out of the surface from any touchscreen.

The feel needs to be in advance of entering data, which is what makes the Tactus technology so impressive.

So how does it work?

Tactus uses microfluidic technology to create physical buttons that rise from the touchscreen to give users the experience or feeling of operating a physical keyboard. When no longer needed, the buttons recede back into the touchscreen, leaving no trace of their presence.

The display stack already uses glass, or something similar between the LCD, and the users touch. The Tactile Layer panel is no thicker than these existing components.

The goal is to put the technology everywhere: smartphones, tablets, ebook readers, gaming devices and automotive displays.

Image Source: TGDaily