06.05.2012 – Tactus Technology gave the first public demonstration of Tactile Layer, at the 2012 Display Week in Boston, Massachusetts. Tactile Layer is a “deformable tactile surface” “with real physical buttons, guidelines, or shapes that rise out of the surface (and recede into invisibility) from any touch screen” In use, Tactile Layer would be installed into devices by replacing a “layer of the already existing display stack” thus not changing the thickness of the device. Tactile Layer utilizes microfluidic technology to create physical buttons on the surface of the screen which “users can feel, press down, and interact with” and that recede when no longer in use. Currently Tactile Layer is being “showcased on a prototype Google Android tablet;” however in the future, this technology could be applied to smartphones, eBook readers, and personal navigation devices. [Source: Tactus Technology]
New Haptic User Interface Prototype for Smartphones
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The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies is sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under grant number 90RE5007-01-00. The opinions contained in this website are those of the Wireless RERC and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or NIDILRR.