tactile on technabob...

While many of you might like the industrial design of the keyboards that Apple has been churning out for the last several years, I still long for keys that FEEL like keys. Thankfully, the guys over at Matias have the same sentiment and are getting ready to release a new Mac keyboard with REAL keys,…

Touchscreens these days mostly allow us to use our fingers like a mouse cursor – point, click, slide etc. Designer Seonkeun Park wants to make a phone for the blind, with a screen and keypad that can form Braille symbols. Park says that the phone’s surface will be made of a material called Electric Active…

As much as I dig my iPhone and HP Touchsmart touchscreens, there’s something that I still miss about actually feeling buttons under my fingertips. And while I’ve gotten pretty good at typing without even looking at the screen anymore, I’ll never achieve the kind of touch typing speed I’ve hit on a traditional keyboard. So…

I sit at a computer much of the day and always thought I was a pretty fast typer. But apparently, those pesky painted letters on my key caps are actually slowing me down. Thankfully, there’s a new keyboard that gets rid of the tiny bit of extra drag that those characters put on my tapping…

Instead of using a traditional 2-dimensional display surface, Shade Pixel renders information using a deformable skin surface which provides a 3-dimensional texture to its output.

Developed by researchers at the Design Media Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the device uses a dot-matrix array of solenoids attached to a flexible…

Do you love the iPhone, but struggle with the smooth on-screen keyboard? Personally, I’ve found it pretty easy to use, but the touchscreen definitely doesn’t offer the touch-typing feedback that you get with physical keys. This new, low cost screen overlay for the iPhone claims to provide tactile cues to your fingertips to help them…

One of the biggest problems with touchscreen interfaces is the lack of any sort of tactile feedback. In response to this concern, Samsung has released a touchscreen phone with Immersion’s VibeTonz haptic feedback system.

The Samsung SCH-W559 phone provides users with a vibration that approximates the sensation of a key click when they interact with…