Mudpad: Fluid Haptics for Multitouch Surfaces

Motivation

This project centers around the idea to use a smart liquid for actuation on a multitouch device.

Since the introduction of the iPhone touchscreens became very common and most people probably have used one by now. While using a touchscreen is often described as enjoyable due to direct interaction techniques, users also complain about the lack of tactile feedback. There are some approaches to alleviate this flaw on mobile phones by using auditory or vibrotactile feedback utilizing the phone vibrate function. Even though this is an improvement, for a multitouch device you would also want multi-point, i.e., localized fedback.

With MudPad, we introduce a device which is able to give localized active haptic feedback while being also capable of multitouch input.

http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/mudpad