So what’s next for touch interfaces? How will they evolve? What factors will prove to be enjoyable for users? Even more important, what improvements will be made to our smartphones, tablets, kiosks and other touch interfaces that will make them usable by people of all abilities and disabilities.
A couple months ago, a team (Kikki Tham Sterner, Johan Ollas, Per Lindgren and Joakim Svarling according to their site) created the iSense concept as their contribution to the Future Lions Competition 2011. It was a braille concept for iPad. The premise centered around having a light-responsive material cover that reacted to the content on the screen and transformed the cover into a tactile surface that could be used by visually impaired individuals. Quite an amazing, useful concept.
Why couldn’t this idea become a reality now rather then later? There have been significant advances in surface technology. Consider this example. What if the screen became tactile and the screen surface itself had texture that replicated the environment you see. For instance, imagine the screen background was wooden boards and as you ran your fingers across the screen you can actually feel the edges of where the boards meet. Sound unreal? It’s actually not.
Senseg,”a leading innovator and provider of feasible and scalable haptic user experiences” headquartered in Finland has made this a reality. With their patent-pending E-Sense technology, they’ve created highly sophisticated touch experiences. For example, this technology has made it possible to feel the edges of a touch-screen key pad. So a user no longer has to rely on visual cues to know that they have pressed a key. They can feel it depress. This technology is also currently being applied to slider controls, rotating controls and web page links.
Toshiba has already picked up this technology last year and is expected to release commercial products like e-readers, notebooks and mobile devices in 2011.
So I guess the big question – can Senseg’s technology possibly bring the iSense (or something like it) to life?