When Tanvas presented its innovative touchscreen technology earlier this year, many were impressed and rightly so. Not only did the ability to make people feel things like textures and resistance open new doors to user interfaces, but this was fun innovation.
Although touchscreens have become ubiquitous in mobile devices, cars, and on all sorts of devices that need controls, the term touch has been a gross exaggeration when you consider what it should mean.
“There are whole industries built around it — cosmetics, for instance,” said Ed Colgate, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, a researcher behind the technology Tanvas uses, and the company’s chief haptics officer. “Then there are the utilitarian aspects of touch. It lets us interact with the physical world.” For example, when you pick something up, you notice its weight and temperature, but there are also sensation receptors in the skin that indicate things like deformation and stretch.
The “physics of interaction” are all missing from touchscreens. If you aren’t using your eyes with a screen, then you can’t tell what it happening. Compare that to flipping a light switch in a dark room. You know when you’ve touched the switch and when you’ve turned it one on, even if the bulb is burnt out and no light comes forth.
All well and good, and simplistic. So what if you have to look at a screen to set a switch? But things rapidly get complicated in real-world applications. Not so long ago, drivers depended on their senses of touch to adjust headlights, radio settings and other operating features of a car. But manufacturers increasingly include high tech with touch panels. Now, if you want to change channels, you must look at the screen. Your eyes are now off the road for a second or two, which could prove dangerous should you get into an accent.
Tanvas offers a new possibility. As your finger glides over the screen, you could have the sensation of a raised area like a switch. Flipping it could result in the sensation of the switch falling into place and then stopping further movement. Or, in a mobile game, you might pull back on a slingshot and feel the stretch of the bands.
The technology works with variable friction controlled through tiny electrostatic charges. “As you slide your finger, we modulate the amount of friction between your finger and the glass,” Colgate said. “We can do it very fast and control it for different levels of friction. The brain interprets that as, ‘Why did my finger slow and then speed up? It must be because it went over a bump.'”
“We took a stock Nexus 9 tablet and glued our piece of glass on it and put a circuit board on the backside and that was it,” Colgate said. “To adopt this technology, someone has to commit to the glass being a Tanvas touch glass. Our technology serves as the cover lens, the haptic output, and also the sensor.”
Colgate thinks early applications will be in niche areas like marketing kiosks intended to attract consumer attention. “I can’t say you’re going to see one of these things for Christmas, but I think in some of these markets we’ve talked about it would probably be sometimes in the latter part of next year.” More advanced and future applications could offer the sensation of different materials, like ceramics or wood.
Tanvas CEO Greg Topel said a number of articles and awards around the time of the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show turned into practical attention from OEMs and such industries as automotive, digital advertising, and public displays. A project with Newcastle University is “doing core research on what this is possibly going to be able to open up for people who have either complete loss of sight or significant loss of sight,” Topel said. “How can we help those people engage with and receive information from a display that currently is vision-based?”
There are some practical issues. The screens cost more than what you’d find in a car display. However, you also remove the cost of the additional haptic equipment built into many devices. On the whole, additional cost might be low enough for manufacturers to adopt the technology. And by next year you may find yourself not only reaching out to touch devices, but finding them reach back to touch you in return.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.