Microsoft develops new shape shifting touchscreen

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

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

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

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