SAN JOSE, Calif.--Artificial Muscle believes that when you touch your computer or phone, it should touch back.
The Silicon Valley company is working on putting haptic feedback in a variety of devices, from laptops to touch-screen phones. Though forced feedback isn't a new concept, the way this company is going about it is different. It showed off some of its technologies at the Interactive Displays 2009 conference here.
Instead of using the vibration motor in a phone to give feedback from a screen, the company has developed and patented an electroactive polymer that expands when it receives an electronic signal. In this case, it's an audio signal, which the actuator, as it is called, receives. Special software tells the actuator to give off a different sort of feedback depending on what a person is touching on the screen.
The idea is that putting feedback like this into phones or computers for playing games, dialing numbers, typing e-mails, and browsing the Web will "enhance the usage experience, so it's not just visual and it's not just audio," said Peter Gise, product manager for Artificial Muscle.
The actuator is very thin (as seen in video below), and can fit into many small handheld devices, or beneath a touch pad on a laptop computer. Gise said they're also targeting Netbooks, since the actuator is "only a couple dollars" each and wouldn't contribute too much to the overall cost of the notoriously low-cost devices.
They've been officially developing haptic technology for six months, and so far they have yet to seal any deals to put it inside consumer devices. In the meantime, check out the brief demo in the video below.
SAN JOSE, Calif--You have to be able to see a screen before you can use multitouch gestures on it.
Mary Lou Jepsen holds an OLPC at a green gadgets conference last year.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)Here at the Interactive Displays 2009 conference, while the rest of the budding touch-screen industry talks about the best way to incorporate multitouch into expensive handheld gadgets, Mary Lou Jepsen is working on how to make computer displays readable in the sunlight--on the cheap.
Jepsen--co-founder of One Laptop Per Child--is now heading up display start-up PixelQi, which makes low-cost, highly efficient displays for low-cost laptops like the XO from OLPC.
"The future of portables is all about the screen," she said. Jepsen believes the ideal display for a device is one that communicates directly with the motherboard, which PixelQi is working on. "Think of screen like a chip on the motherboard: it can massively lower power consumption and (increase) battery life and create a much better visual experience."
Her main concern is computers that get shipped to children in the developing world, where laptops that don't take a lot of power, and are readable in sunlight are "must haves." Eventually they should incorporate the best touch and multitouch technology.
"The screens shouldn't be TVs," she said.
Her company's first product, 3Qi, arrives in the next month. It's, as she puts it, three different kinds of displays as one: a low-power black and white mode, an e-paper mode, and a high-resolution color LCD TV mode.
MIT Media Lab graduate student Pranav Mistry demonstrates the Wear Ur World device, which would free data from the confines of paper or screen.
(Credit: MIT)Step aside, Apple and Microsoft. If MIT's little Sixth Sense gadget sees the commercial light of day, we can toss our multitouch devices out the window. Who needs a Surface or an iPhone when the very idea of being able to access information by turning any flat surface into a touch-screen display sounds far more appealing? No surface available? Simply project a screen onto your hand, and voila. Shades of Minority Report?
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise draws information from a glove-controlled interactive wall.
(Credit: 20th Century Fox)The folks at MIT have christened their wearable prototype Wear Ur World (WUW), a device cobbled together using everyday gizmos like a mobile projector, Webcam, and mobile phone. Hopefully, when the final product does ship, it'll reveal a sleeker, less clunky rendition without the colored finger bands, and one that has a discreet mode for when you need to access information privately.
As a demonstration of its capabilities, the wearer can draw a circle on his wrist, prompting the gadget to project a digital clock face, especially great for the myopic.
In the near future, WUW could become an indispensible digital wrist companion to enhance your lifestyle. It could provide product and price comparison information when shopping, retrieve flight information to let the wearer know about delays, automatically pull up related information from the Web when requested, and even snap pictures when you frame a subject with your fingers.
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