Innovators harness the power of touch

In his 1930 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley described a world where touch would be exploited by the technology of the future. How wrong he was.

Of all the senses, touch has been woefully neglected as a way for humans to interact with machines.

The science of haptics - which will lead to computer users interacting with virtual worlds by feel - means to change all that.

Labs around the world are now racing to close the gap. No more so, perhaps, than Sony's Interactive Laboratories in Tokyo, where Russian researcher Ivan Poupyrev sees a huge future.

While Wimp (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) user interfaces allow reasonably efficient interaction with computers in a desktop environment, they are difficult to use on small, handheld devices.

"We don't do enough with touch," said Poupyrev. "With 'feelable' devices we can redesign the interface. All designers hate buttons."

So far, his lab has come up with a concept for a PDA that responds to bending and fully-rigged feelable graphic interfaces.

Poupyrev and his team have created a prototype touchscreen PDA, called Touch Engine, which adds what has been missing since the advent of such devices: a sense of touch in the form of tactile feedback.

Touch Engine uses tiny bendable strips of crystals, called actuators, which are placed under the PDA's LCD screen and pulsate slightly when the screen is touched.

"When you touch a button on the flat screen, the actuators move in such a way that you can actually feel a click under your finger," explained Poupyrev.

So far, the lab has developed a handheld device with four fingertip-sized, software-generated clickable buttons and a desktop computer with tablet-style display that allows the user to draw across the surface and feel textures such as the lines of a grid.

Pointing becomes more accurate, because the tactile feedback gives the user the physical sensation of touching a point on the screen.

"Buttons can be drawn anywhere on screen as there is no connection between the position of the actuator and buttons," said Poupyrev.

Touch a graphical button and the PDA software sends a signal to all four actuators hidden in the four corners of the screen. They react rapidly and simultaneously, moving the entire touch-sensitive glass on top of the LCD.

Only the screen moves. "The illusion would be totally lost if the entire device vibrated," explained Poupyrev.

Sony is ready to take the feelable PDA a step further with a bendable computer. Doing away with buttons altogether, Sony envisages credit card-sized PCs that will do as we ask just by being touched and bent with two hands. The lab has already built a prototype.

The so-called Gummi is far from perfect, as the lab is still waiting for its first truly bendable organic light-emitting display (Oled).

But the idea is to exploit the flexibility inherent in newly developed materials such as the organic screen.

Built and designed by Poupyrev, German designer Carsten Schwesig and Japanese designer Eijiro Mori, the prototype consists of a flexible Oled, electronic circuits, a touch-sensitive panel on the back of the device and an embedded sensor which measures bending.

The resulting device would be extremely thin and highly flexible, and would have no mechanical parts.

Bendable media cards could take the form of city maps or mini photo albums, making flicking through them as easy as flipping through the pages of a book.

"Everyone is focused on making the materials, for example on flexible electronics or displays. Very few people are looking into how these devices can be used and what are the killer, unique apps," said Poupyrev.

It's a million miles from Huxley's vision: not enslaving the users, but empowering them.

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