We as humans have this great gift of being aware what surrounds us by our vision and hearing, but we are also blessed with the ability to touch and feel everything around us. Soon enough we’ll be able to use our smartphones and tablets in a whole different way thanks to a company called Senseg and their revolutionary touchscreen technology.
What Senseg have manufactured is a new type of touchscreen that allows you to feel the virtual surface, texture or pattern that’s on your device’s screen. Basically the display turns screen touches into feels using an electrostatic field. There isn’t any mechanical or vibration-borne haptic magic going on, instead the screen modulates friction depending on the virtual surface that is displayed. This gives your fingertips the different feelings when you go over pictures of ridges, textures and contours.
The applications of such technology are immense and virtually unlimited. Naturally, this will be super helpful to blind people helping them read braille, game designers will make their games much more fun and interesting. If everything goes according to Senseg’s plan and this technology is welcomed by device manufacturers and OS vendors, we could see this sort of touch technology in place within the next 12 months. Impressive, isn’t it?
Here’s a video, courtesy of CNET, where the technology is demoed:
