Enhancing your touch screen design with haptic tactile feedback

an article by Steve Kingsley-Jones (Director of Product Management at Immersion) about the potential of haptic feed back combined with touch screen and the problems related to its implementation (from Embedded.com, link via cellodude on the IV MB):

>>The popularity of touch screens as a user input device has grown quickly. Some of the demand, as in the Apple iPhone, reflect the competitive market advantage of a superior user interface. For other applications, safety concerns, distraction issues and other usability problems need to be overcome.

Customers from all market segments - industrial, commercial, as well as consumer - continue to demand better human-computer interfaces. One of the latest advances for the touch-activated interface is tactile feedback, or haptic technology, which can provide immediate, unmistakable confirmation to the user.

The feature has been found to improve user performance and satisfaction. Also, product designers may be able to minimize feature complexity by providing intuitive tactile cues. This article describes how to add tactile feedback to a product's touch-activated interface.

Haptic effects library. The tactile effects library should include a wide variety of effects so that the feel of various touchscreen controls can be clearly distinguished and functions differentiated. It is best if the haptic development system gives user interface designers a convenient method for experiencing effects, so they can choose the best effect from the haptic library.

The key parameters needed to respond to this burgeoning design requirement are actuation integration, mounting, haptic control and programming. When implemented following the guidelines presented here, a haptic system can make a clear difference in how a touch-activated control feels - and how intuitive, satisfying, and natural user interactions can be.



Figure 4: Larger products, those with touch interfaces from 7-inches up to 36-inches require larger actuators. The Immersion A100 (top) and A300 are two examples.