Touchscreen Knob Concept is Turning a Lot of Heads
May 16th, 2010
In general, devices with touchscreens are intuitive, but not always convenient. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for an actual physical interface. For example, the possible motions for rotation on a touchscreen are awkward, whereas if you had a knob you could easily perform rotation. The folks at dsLabs tried to come up with a solution to that problem – a touchscreen knob.
As you can see their design is a bit crude – they had to make sure that current from the fingers still gets to the touchscreen, hence the need for the conductive material. But they also realized that they didn’t have to add conductive material – you can use an ordinary knob and “grab it such that your fingers actually touch the screen making it nothing more than a physical prop to provide some tactile feedback.”
As some of the commenters on Vimeo said, the knob would help not only with manipulating images but also with controlling music apps or any other app that will benefit from knob controls.
[via OhGizmo!]
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Categories: Design Gadgets Hacks + Mods Interactive Mobile Tech Strange + Wonderful Technology
I immediately think of the scene from The Island where the director has that pyramid device which appears to be a physical manipulation device on a kind of multi-touch screen. Not to mention thinking of the vapour Microsoft Courier, which combined fingers and a pen for different modes of interaction.
Of course, it suits a desktop device more so than something intended to be portable.
I like it “proper” the iphone u cant beat it, the new mini iphone is just the right size, well for my hands any way. respsect apple