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Lofty Thought of the Day
- Category: Science & Technology
By Michael Fitzpatrick - Tokyo, Japan When Aldous Huxley described the 'Feelies' of his 1930s satire Brave New World he envisaged a world in which touch would be exploited by the technology of the future as much as vision. How wrong he was. Of all the senses, touch has been somewhat neglected as a human means of interacting with machines.
Haptics - which could lead to people interacting with virtual objects using a sense of touch or feel - means to change all that. Labs around the world are now racing to close the gap while the first commercial applications are hitting the market.
For the first time people will be actually be able to have a virtual feel of some of the images that are placed before them.
Keeping in touch:
A leading advocate of haptics is Russian scientist Dr Ivan Poupyrev, now a senior researcher at Disney Research Labs in Pittsburgh. He claims this area is going to be "huge", particularly for hand-held devices.
"We don't do enough with touch," said Dr Poupyrev.
"The basic goal of the technology we are developing at Disney is to create a perception of texture - to let people 'feel' objects on screen by stroking them with their fingers.
The results can recreate the feeling of paper or a textile, simulate the smoothness of glass and even the roughness of sand paper....
Bendable tech
However, being able to feel feedback though the fingertips from a hand-held screen was just the start.
Ivan Poupyrev also teamed up with designers Carsten Schwesig and Eijiro Mori to develop a bendable credit-card-sized device nicknamed Gummi. The card is activated by the bending motion.
The prototype Gummi uses bendable organic light-emitting display (OLED) technology. Sony claims to have created the world's most flexible OLED so far - so thin and flexible that the colour display can be rolled around a pencil while streaming video...MORE...
