It’s taken them 10 years but Nokia boffins have finally perfected a ‘touch feedback’ touchscreen.
Don’t be fooled by simple vibrational imitations folks, this is the
real McCoy – you press a key on the screen, and it clicks under your
finger with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as if you’d
pressed a conventional keyboard key. Roope Takala, Senior Program
Manager at Nokia’s research labs gave me a demo of the technology in
Finland the other day on a hacked N770 Internet tablet.
“The basic technology is not that difficult,” he explained, “We
inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in
a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been
fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of
pressing a real key.”
The problem in perfecting the tech – codenamed Haptikos, meaning ‘to
touch’ – lies in how our fingers experience a key press. We actually
feel two movements, in and out, and these movements and the associated
audio have to be perfectly attuned to the speed and responsiveness of a
real keyboard. In use, the touch feedback on the demo device was near
on perfect. Each press of a key returned a clunky click and
tactile snap on the touchscreen, which made typing feel incredibly
responsive and very usable on the smooth screen surface. In fact it was
hard to remember that you were using a touchscreen keyboard.
“Funnily enough, although you think you’re typing faster than normal
because of the feedback, in actual fact you’re not,” said Takala,
“There’s just some sort of mental satisfaction that comes from typing
with a tactile response.”
The new Haptikos technology will apparently be shipped with the
upcoming Nokia S60 Touch phone that has been shown off at recent demos,
and the team is busy working on the next challenge, which is to provide
exact tactile replicas for scrolling and draw/paint programs. The
problem is that while we expect and need ultra fast responses for
keyboard use, navigation and things like drag scrolling require a
different, slower response map, which is another hurdle for the
engineers to overcome.
“What’s nice is that people who are new to handheld devices don’t
even notice this technology at first,” says Takala with a smile. “But
they really miss it if you take it away from them once they’ve
experienced it. It’s kind of addictive.”
One thing I can say is that this is the first technology I’ve seen
and played with which could genuinely revolutionise the use of handheld
devices in general. The ability to touch type at reasonable speeds on a
touchscreen is something which every phone, PDA and handheld computer
manufacturer would give their right arm for, and it looks as though the
technology is about to reach the marketplace with a bang. I can’t wait.
