The technology involved in touch screen monitors is improving all the time. These days, many consumers and companies around the world are making use of touch screens in a variety of ways.
One new development concerns the creation of textures on touch screens. According to a report in the Daily Mail, Senseg has been working on the use of electrical currents to have the effect of ‘pulling’ the skin on people’s fingers towards the surface of the screens, creating textures they can feel. The feature is totally silent.
Commenting on the idea, the publication stated: “The results can be used to create control dials that you can feel on screen – or even to create pictures with textures, such as a rough wall that actually feels like stone.”
The effect does not rely on screens being bent in anyway. Instead it is purely electrical. Currents in the surface of the touch screen monitors push and pull the skin on users’ fingers to create the feeling of texture and it is suggested that the level of detail that can be achieved is almost akin to real objects.
Remarking on this, the news source said: “The effect is sophisticated enough to create the feeling of edges, buttons, dials and different textures – it’s more precisely ‘located’ in the screen than previous generations of vibration effects.”
Meanwhile, the effect is also said to be much faster than current vibration feedbacks because there are no moving parts.
At present, the technology is at the prototype stage, but Senseg suggested that it can be added to devices at little cost, so it may start to appear in products soon.
The sophistication of touch screen devices continues to develop apace and this trend shows no sign of slowing. It is easy to forget that in the not too distant past, such provisions were the stuff of science fiction.