Microsoft designs application to construct a Tactile touchscreen

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 29 November 2010, 23:54 IST
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Microsoft designs application to construct a Tactile touchscreen
Bangalore: A display that utilizes technical tricks so as to convince the users regarding them touching the ridges, bumps and textures of a displayed image, popularly known as "tactile" touchscreen is to be constructed with the design of the new application of Microsoft. The experts still have not confirmed to the feasibility of the idea of Microsoft's design, proposing the production of a real texture using pixel- sized shape- memory plastic cells. The presence of conventional touchscreens is known to have limitations wherein they can be noisy and a buzz can be heard due to the frequencies being in the audio range. "Creating well-defined bumps on a touch surface is in many ways the holy grail of text entry on touch devices because it would enable touch typing at much faster speeds than on touchscreens today," New Scientist quoted Patrick Baudisch, a display interaction expert at the University of Potsdam in Germany, as saying. "There would be no more reason for mobile keypads - they would simply be emulated when necessary. That could affect massive change in this field." Erez Kikin-Gil, Microsoft's named inventor the idea is not aimed at a smaller platform like phones or tablets but at table- sized computing displays such as the company's surface. As per the patent, modulation of wavelengths can create textures when the display coated with a light-induced shape-memory polymer which hardens when one wavelength of ultraviolet light is transmitted at a pixel and becomes soft due to another wavelength hitting it.