Tactus
There’s no need to be embarrassed. We’ve all thought it before. You love your smartphone. You adore its spacious screen and its helpful apps. Still, you miss your old Blackberry keyboard.
It’s the one place where smartphones were a big step backward: We went from sending no-look texts under the table to appending “sent from my phone, please excuse typos” disclaimers to emails. Even with clever autocorrect algorithms and fancy swipe-to-spell software, typing on a screen doesn’t compare to typing on a real keyboard. So are we stuck here forever? Maybe not. What if there was a touchscreen that could give you real, physical buttons—but only when you need them?
That’s what Tactus Technology is trying to build. The California startup’s spent nearly five years developing a technique that makes see-through buttons materialize on top of touchscreens, as if by magic. Now, it’s readying its first consumer product, an iPad Mini case called Phorm. It’s not exactly a touch screen typing revelation, but it is an intriguing look at how we might supercharge our flat glass gizmos in the future.
Aiming for a Better Typing Experience
Tactus’ shapeshifting buttons rely on a technology called microfluidics, long used in ink jet printers. In this case, it involves a transparent panel, carved with imperceptibly small grooves, that sits on top of a device’s display—“a screen protector on steroids,” as Tactus co-founder Craig Ciesla puts it. When triggered, a change in pressure sends tiny amounts of fluid through the grooves, causing a pre-determined pattern of small bubbles to rise up from the surface of the screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment