Touch screens to become tactile

The stylus and hardware keyboard to become extinct?

Immersion, a developer of haptic technologies has announced that it plans to launch its latest technology - push buttons for touch screens. Anyone who has used a PDA, GPS or smartphone with a touch screen keyboard, knows the difficulties you have. Never quite sure if you hit the button or not, a thirty second text message can turn into a ten minute chore. What Immersion are creating is a sensation that makes you feel like you are pressing down on a button when you touch the icon on screen. The screen feels like it is flexing under your finger, when it’s actually sending a small vibration to your finger.

The VibeTonz Mobile Player is a vibration motor similar to that in your standard mobile phone but it is capable of precise, high speed control over the vibrations to produce “tactile effects with unprecedented subtlety and dynamics” according to Mobiledia. I think this could be a standard feature in the not too distant future. In the same way it’s hard to imagine a mobile phone without vibrate mode, or a PS2 controller without feedback vibrations, hopefully it’ll soon be hard to remember what it was like to have an unresponsive keypad on your PDA…hopefully.

Any thoughts or ideas, post and let me know.