Future directions for tactile feedback technology

Peter Odum at the blog Idlemode has a good round-up of various existing technologies and future concepts for adding tactile feedback to touchscreens. His list: physical overlays, air or liquid filled bladders, piezoelectric mechanisms, pressable mechanical touchscreen, the band-aid display, nanotech and ultrasound. From his introduction:

A variety of devices currently on the market provide simple forms of
touch feedback, but none is an unqualified success - they all lack some
aspect of physical experience, a correspondence with the way we
actually interact with the world. Current tactile solutions fall short
either in reconfigurability or in pre-interaction feedback. This
pre-interaction feedback would provide the physical feeling of a button
which the user can press or not, rather than just a tactile
confirmation that they have just pressed that button. Reconfigurability
would allow physically felt controls to change with the content of the
display. In short, it’s easy to make static physical buttons, but not
to make them disappear when not needed. And it’s easy to provide a
physical sensation after the user interacts, but not to provide buttons
that can be physically felt *before* the interaction is committed.

Link: Future Directions for Tactile Feedback.