Touchscreen Pop-Up Buttons

Research from CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute featured in Technology Review:

Touch-screen technology has become wildly popular, thanks to smart phones designed for nimble fingers. But most touch screens have a major drawback: you need to keep a close eye on the screen as you tap, to make sure that you hit the right virtual buttons. As touch screens become more popular in other contexts, such as in-car navigation and entertainment systems, this lack of sensory feedback could become a dangerous distraction.

Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed buttons that pop out from a touch-screen surface. The design retains the dynamic display capabilities of a normal touch screen but can also produce tactile buttons for certain functions.

Graduate student Chris Harrison and computer-science professor Scott Hudson have built a handful of proof-of-concept displays with the morphing buttons. The screens are covered in semitransparent latex, which sits on top of an acrylic plate with shaped holes and an air chamber connected to a pump. When the pump is off, the screen is flat; when it's switched on, the latex forms concave or convex features around the cutouts, depending on negative or positive pressure.

Link: Touch Screens with Pop-Up Buttons (via Engadget)

The research was presented earlier this month at CHI 2009. One of the authors, Chris Harrison, has set up a project page with more details and the CHI paper for download: Providing Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display.

Here's a video about the work that they put on YouTube:

It'll be a while before this makes it to your mobile phone, but it's still pretty cool stuff.

Comments

[celebrity picture]

Great innnovation, useful, Thanks for the info