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Phones with feeling are more useful

Touch-screen phones like the iPhone may be cool, but without the tactile feedback provided by a keyboard, they force users to type slowly and lead to typing errors. Now Stephen Brewster and colleagues at the University of Glasgow in the UK say they can banish these problems by using actuators like those that make cellphones vibrate to replicate the feel of a keyboard.

Software called VibeTonz made by Immersion of San Jose, California, can get an actuator to move in different ways, such as smoothly or jerkily. Touch-screen phones made by Samsung and LG use this to provide rudimentary "haptic" feedback when a button is pressed, but Brewster says phones could do much more. "The actuators are there, but people aren't using them in the most effective way."

To create more sophisticated sensations, his group strung together combinations of different VibeTonz. A single pulse 30 milliseconds long gives the feeling of a button being clicked, while sliding a finger from one button to another prompts a half-second long buzz, providing a "rough" feeling that tells the user they've strayed to another key. Sliding the finger across a button causes the buzz to be ramped up and then down, giving the feel of a round button.

The team found that users' typing speed and accuracy were significantly closer to results they achieved using a real keyboard, compared with when the haptics were disabled. The team will present its results at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Florence, Italy, next month.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19726485.100-phones-with-feeling-are-more-useful.html