Tactus Technology unveils touchscreen prototype with appearing and disappearing keys (hands-on)
Amidst the excitement for the original iPhone way back in 2007 was a big question: would users be able to adjust to typing on a touchscreen, with no visual or tactile cues for orienting your fingers?
Context & Ripple Effects
The problem Tactus is attacking dates straight back to 2007: when the iPhone dropped physical keys for a flat sheet of glass, it traded tactile orientation for flexibility, and Nokia publicly bet on the other side with its clicky tactile touchscreen that same year. The intervening years produced research answers rather than products — AppleInsider detailed a possible multi-touch tactile keyboard for a then-unreleased Apple tablet in late 2009, and New Scientist reported Microsoft's shape-shifting touchscreen work in November 2010.
What makes this week's demo notable is that Tactus, a startup rather than a platform giant, has turned that research thread into a hands-on working prototype with keys that physically rise out of and retract into the glass — and the pickup across Gizmodo, GigaOM, Pocketnow, IntoMobile and LAPTOP Magazine shows how much pent-up demand there still is for touch feedback five years after the all-glass keyboard became the norm.
First-order effects
- Device makers now have a third-party option for restoring tactile typing on flat glass without adding mechanical buttons or thickness, putting pressure on their own labs' tactile-display research programs.
- Tactus moves from patent-stage concept to demonstrable hardware, which shifts its near-term challenge from proving feasibility to proving the layer can be manufactured thin and cheap enough for consumer devices.
Second-order effects
- Big-screen incumbents with competing approaches — most visibly Microsoft, whose shape-shifting touchscreen research was reported in 2010 — face a choice between licensing, accelerating internal work, or letting a supplier own the tactile layer of the stack.
- If physical keys can appear on demand, the market for fixed haptic substitutes (vibration-based feedback schemes) weakens, since buyers gain a path to true key travel instead of simulated clicks.
Third-order effects
- The display stops being purely an output surface: if morphing-key layers reach production, screens become reconfigurable input devices too, and whoever controls that layer gains leverage over both display makers and UI designers.
- A successful tactile layer would partially reverse the design consensus set by the 2007 iPhone — that flat glass was worth losing key travel for — pushing the industry toward hybrid surfaces where physical form follows the app on screen.
The trend: Touchscreen hardware is moving from static glass toward physically adaptive surfaces that restore the tactile cues the all-glass interface discarded.