A Sticky Touch Screen Lets You Feel the Buttons 72
mikejuk sent one in that sends absolute shivers up my spine. "I have a problem with sticky touch screens — whenever I try to clean the jam off I activate and use a lot of apps I never intended to. However it looks as if sticky is the way of the future. A prototype screen has been shown that varies the friction as you move your finger across it. The result is that you can 'feel' the buttons and notches on scroll bars. It sure beats having to build real buttons..."
...and all the screens are stuck together... (Score:1)
So "jam" is what they're calling it now, eh?
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http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/daily.html [suck.com]
I keep the screen away ... (Score:1)
from all activities that could um make the screen sticky.
Nothing new (Score:1)
Those keyboards didn't start out sticky. It's best not to think about why they are sticky. And wear gloves if you have to touch the keyboard.
What am I missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
whenever I try to clean the jam off I activate and use a lot of apps I never intended to.
Turn it off and clean it? Or am I missing something.
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Haptic feedback (Score:2)
is just fancy talk for "This stuff is leading directly to sexbots. You'll thank us later."
From TFA: (Score:2)
"Instead of embedding lots of transducers across the surface of the panel the system tracks the figure position and simply turns the vibration on and off. "
Bye bye multitouch?
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Great, now we just need (Score:1)
Touch screens that "bulge" out at arbitrary places where 'haptic buttons' are placed. That are pressure sensitive, and that you can feel going down when you push them.
Friction alone is not much feedback. We also need to know when we've pushed a button.
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Touch screens that "bulge" out at arbitrary places where 'haptic buttons' are placed.
That are pressure sensitive, and that you can feel going down when you push them.
Wake me when I can buy a Goa'uld tablet PC.
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They just stole the technology from another race, you know.
Hmm... Bill ? Steve ? Blood test, please ?
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We'll never have a brain-machine interface like the one you're talking about, though.
Why not?
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Because brain surgery is expensive, messy, painful, and prone to kill a small, but non-zero, percentage of patients. We're not talking about a boob job here, no ethical doctor is going to open up your skull and poke around installing consumer electronics becasue you think it's cool. You might see some limited applications for people who have legitimate medial problems that direct implants will solve (optical or audio sensors wired to the appropriate nerves or brain centers for the blind or deaf come to mi
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Never say never. Your comments might be true at the moment, but technologies and societies change.
Look at all the other medical procedures being done today because "it's cool":
1) laser eye surgery (not a medical necessity, you can wear glasses)
2) skull implanted hearing aids (not a medical necessity, you can just be deaf)
3) breast implants (I don't think I need to elaborate here)
4) penile implants (not a medical necessity, you don't NEED to have sex when you're old or impotent, you can just go without)
5) O
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Of all of those I'd only rate the LAZIK surgery as being in the same ball park. The rest either correct an otherwise uncorrectable deficiency (skull implanted hearing aides), or are "cosmetic" in more ways than one. One of the hallmarks of nearly all elective cosmetic surgery (every procedure I know of at any rate, though I grant you that my knowledge is unlikely to be all encompassing or even close to it) is that they never get past "superficial" cuts. They may cut into skin, fatty tissue, even muscle in
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The rest either correct an otherwise uncorrectable deficiency (skull implanted hearing aides), or are "cosmetic" in more ways than one.
Deafness is a deficiency, but so is being fat, ugly, short, etc. Liposuction and other cosmetic surgeries work on the first two of those (there's no treatment for shortness I know of). But none of these are medical necessities. You don't need to hear to function in society, any more than you need to be beautiful. It certainly helps (a lot in many cases, just look at all
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We most likely will, it would just require advanced nanotechnology and a much better understanding of brain physiology than we have now (easier said than done, I know). Although it would likely happen decades after systems that just tie a display into the optic nerve and the input into basic nerve impulses or muscle movements.
"Never" is an extremely broad statement to make, given the time scale it implies. The only
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Still don't fix a major problem with touch screens (Score:2, Interesting)
...the lack of tactile feedback.
For what I used to call mouse guestures - I don't know what to call them now that a mouse isn't involved any longer - a touch screen is great. Just wipe, swipe and pinch all you like and it works great and intuitively. For pushing buttons... not so great in my opinion, and even less if you don't get an immediate feedback (visual or auditory) telling you if the button press have been registered or not. And don't even get me started on the on-screen-keyboard thing... combining
Re:Still don't fix a major problem with touch scre (Score:4, Informative)
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The biggest thing I'd want feedback for is knowing where to put my finger, and that doesn't get helped at all with this, because it happens when the finger's already touching it, and in fact only when it's moving. Aside from that, help moving a text carat would be great, I suppose, but I don't see most of the rest being useful.
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It's useful for text entry actually. If you tap the wrong key you just shift left or right and the feedback tells you when you can lift your finger - after a few times you'll probalby
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It also only works while the finger is moving across the screen. This technology relies on the differential formed by varying between vibrating and not vibrating. You can't have a differential if you're just tapping the screen.
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I've had a sticky touch screen after viewing porn many times.
I see... Seems like you were clearly holding it wrong.
They're jamming our radar! (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Too many obvious jokes for this (Score:1)
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You mean like: but feeling the "buttons" is what got the screen sticky in the first place?
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Am I the only one that misses buttons? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, am I?
Buttons provide tactile response about location and success of triggering a function. Both aspects are quite useful for things like accessibility, but I still prefer the knowledge of having hit a button on a cell phone keypad or qwerty over the use of a touchscreen where I have to constantly be looking at what I'm typing.
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You are not. I miss physical buttons too. I hate having to look at the screen to do everything.
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You (and the people who modded you up) do know they still make phones with buttons, right? You don't have to miss them at all.
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Hmm. I'd never actually tried that, so I just gave it a shot:
On my Droid 1, I slid out the keyboard. I then entered a phone number. I pressed enter.
It worked great. I see no reason why I'd have to use the screen, at all, to do this: The behavior was very predictable.
Next time the phone rings, I'll try to answer it without the touchscreen. Who knows, i
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Yep, mine too.
Just press enter (or return, or whatever the hell the represents newline on the slide-out keyboard), which tells Google Search to launch whatever the default action is for the data you've entered. For a phone number, that means that Dialer loads up, and -- well -- dials.
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Can you suggest a decent smartphone with a physical keyboard that works on 1700/2100Mhz AWS? And by decent, I am looking for something roughly comparable with the Nexus S and not produced by RIM. And no, switching carriers is not an option, unless there are other carriers in both the US and Canada supporting the same frequencies and providing comparible service - in terms of price, coverage and customer service.
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I think I miss buttons more than you. phone shmone, I hate that my external LCD has no buttons.
I want a big, easy to feel in the dark, cheap, classic button that closes or opens a circuit, dam it! Like the red button on this thing [google.com].
I'm only 28, and I'm already thinking about the fact that some young people have never felt and heard the satisfying "click" that a real button makes. It is somehow strange to feel so old.
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Wrong. Buttons break. They wear down and off. They get in the way when you're not using them. I can't count the number of devices I've had, prematurely bound for the trash heap because of a single button. It's always cheaper to replace the entire unit than fix them. You can delude yourself with rosy memories, I'll enjoy my new found freedom and my devices that last longer with fewer moving parts.
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Samsung galaxy.
Or, you know, stop whining and get a blackberry.
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I actually usually prefer a touch screen, but there's a big catch. There can't be ANY lag. My iPhone is great - almost everything responds immediately, and I have no problems at all.
My GPS has the same type of touch screen, but it's horrible. There's a little (very very tiny bit, actually) lag, but it's enough to really throw me off.
Basically, touch screens suck when the hardware can't keep up with the interface.
explanation of the vibration (Score:3, Informative)
TFA indicates that the screen vibrates to create a thin layer of air between the finger and the screen. That results in low friction. When the finger "touches" a button, the vibration stops, the finger "touches down on" the screen and the friction increases, telling the finger and the brain that a button (or a notch on a scroll bar, etc.) has been reached. That differs from currently-widely-available haptic feedback because the vibration is in the screen itself and not the entire device.
I don't get it (Score:1)
Sticky touchscreen (Score:1)
hmm... (Score:2)
i wonder if something similar could be done using static cling effects. But then i guess that would mess up the use of Capacitive screens (unless the system was clever enough to eliminate the noise from the active sections).
Wiimote already does this (Score:2)
This is the method that the Wiimote already uses to let you 'feel' the buttons or letters on the screen. It works well. When you get the edge of a button, you feel a 'bump'. From reading the article, this appears to be exactly the same thing, except on a touch-screen.
Alpine PulseTouch (Score:2)
From the description this sounds the same as Alpine PulseTouch which came out for their in-car media units several years ago