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Microsoft develops shape-shifting touchscreen !!!

Microsoft this week filed a patent application covering a novel way to construct a "tactile" touchscreen – a display that uses technical tricks to convince users they are actually touching the ridges, bumps and textures of a displayed image.

Whereas previous screens produced only an illusion of texture, Microsoft proposes producing a real texture, using pixel-sized shape-memory plastic cells that can be ordered to protrude from the surface on command.

It's a new approach to the challenge, but not the first. Communications giant Nokia, Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a Finnish firm called Senseg are all developing displays that use voltages of different frequencies, applied to a grid below the touchscreen, to trick our fingertips into experiencing a wide variety of touch sensations. They are known as vibrotactile displays.

They work well, but have limitations. For one thing, they can be noisy: some of the frequencies are in the audio range, so a buzz can be heard. Such problems may have prompted Microsoft to pursue a radically different approach.

End of Keypads : If it works it certainly would be welcome, says Patrick Baudisch, a display interaction expert at the University of Potsdam in Germany, who worked on the Surface in its early days.

"Creating well-defined bumps on a touch surface is in many ways the holy grail of text entry on touch devices because it would enable touch typing at much faster speeds than on touchscreens today," he says.

And if it could be used on smaller devices, it could spell the end of keypads on phones, he believes. "There would be no more reason for mobile keypads – they would simply be emulated when necessary. That could effect massive change in this field."

Just see this video :-o You will feel it !!!