TeslaTouch, the touch screens that touches back

This is the graal of touch technologies: a screen that feels like real keys when you touch it. Nokia has been experimenting with such technologies since 2007 (project Haptikos), and came with another solution last fall (electrovibration), but no product has yet reached the production stage.

TeslaTouch, developed by the Disney Research Team at Carnegie Mellon University, is another technology using electrovibration that could change the way we experience touch screens.

TeslaTouch lets your fingers actually feel what the screen shows. When you move a file on the screen with your finger, you can feel how big it is. Because TeslaTouch can provide a wide variety of tactile(or haptic) sensations such as textures, friction and vibration, Disney calls it the “future of feel.” [...]

A virtual keyboard on a touch screen equipped with TeslaTouch would allow users to feel the location of the keys and learn how to touch type. When users click on a file to drag it into a folder, they would be able to feel the weight or size of the file and know when it had successfully reached its destination. Larger files such as movies could also be made to feel heavier than smaller text files. Artists drawing on their touch devices could feel paint and paper.

But just like the Nokia technologies, TeslaTouch has big limitations, and does not seem ready for mass production just yet:

Currently TeslaTouch only works to provide tactile feedback for a sliding finger, not a finger at rest, and it does not work with multiple fingers — so multitouch capabilities such as that found on the iPhone is out of the question for now.

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