Filed under: Hardware, Odds and ends, Apple
Apple working on pressure sensitive touchscreens
Apple Insider's got the latest on yet another Apple patent application, this one for not just touch sensitive screens, but for pressure sensitive touchscreens. Right now, the iPhone can tell where you're touching it, but not how hard you're pressing on it. The device described in the patent could do just that, and use the force information "for purposes of providing command and control signals to an associated electronic device."Pretty interesting. I can't think of a great use for it besides the one Wacom and other high-end input tablets already use (the harder you press, the darker mark you can make with a virtual pencil), but then again, I'm not an award-winning user interface designer (just a pretty average user interface user). Who knows what Apple could come up with using an interface like this-- maybe flip through CoverFlow albums front-to-back as well as horizontally?
Of course, like all patents, as AI notes, Apple has no obligation to actually use this design in any of their products. But just in case you needed any more hints that they're not walking away from a touchscreen interface anytime soon, here you go.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jps said 10:38AM on 10-06-2007
Two words: right click.
Reply
bugula said 10:24AM on 10-06-2007
Uh...best use for it? A tablet?
I just bought a PC tablet knowing that if I did, Apple would release one so I'm nudging them to do so. :)
Reply
Vaughn Simon said 10:46AM on 10-06-2007
Maybe they are using the same idea of the Axiotron ModBook. For those of you who dont know what that is, here is the link: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ModBook
Reply
Liquidmark said 10:53AM on 10-06-2007
"Two words: right click."
Seriously?
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/design.html
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/software.html
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/specs.html
When will that stupid Right-Click myth just die?
I'm seriously tired of seeing it on my internets.
Reply
Gary said 10:58AM on 10-06-2007
Pretty critical in the majority of current UI designs for marking copy/paste/etc selection operations - right now the iPhone and iTouch are a little like zero button mice :-) every where you point, you click. Multi-touch gestures have given some great new interaction opportunities for the lucky iPhone designers - what a great UI project to work on - but pressure, even if it's only a boolean on/off state is hugely helpful/intuitive/fast for say, editing text documents...
Reply
Shaah said 11:05AM on 10-06-2007
Newton.
Reply
Christina Warren said 12:22PM on 10-06-2007
I think that could be hugely beneficial, not just for a tablet (which would be awesome) but forfuture iPhone/iTouch models. Even for something like volume control, instead of tapping the levels higher or dragging a bar with your finger, how hard or how soft you press could instantly raise/lower the level. And it would be great for adding right-click functionality to the iPhone/iTouch that would be intuitive, like, after selecting text, pressing firmly opens the menu, where as pressing softly let's you change the position.
Very, very cool.
Reply
jonathan ober said 12:44PM on 10-06-2007
what about click and highlight as you have the touch screen pressed harder? I think it would be helpful in doing the copy paste that people are complaining about, or just for highlighting stuff in notes.
maybe someday we will click and hold and then highlight, could access the bold, italic or other handy "highlighted on harder press" functions.
ive been waiting for something like notes to be updated with tabbed numbering, bullets, bold, italics, the stuff that helps set that marker tip font apart so i dont have to read over everything...just the important notes that i take.
maybe this is the answer
Reply
punkassjim said 2:06PM on 10-06-2007
Nail on the head, jonathan. Anything they can do to increase the number of "mouse events" on a device like the iPhone, the better.
It would necessitate a new way of thinking, and people would need to sensitize themselves to the nuances of movement and pressure required to perform a particular task...but that's kinda what we needed to do back in the 80s with the mouse, so I'm sure things could change again. Hell, the multi-touch screen alone is a pretty big paradigm shift.
Reply
jonathan ober said 3:10PM on 10-06-2007
you want a paradigm shift, go to http://www.dontclick.it/ that site changed the way I think about user interface design.
I'd love it if apple even implemented one of the things that I mentioned. One, because I could say 'Boya' and two well, it just makes sense that a pressure touch support would be the next phase in the iPhone/iPod technology, although I'm not sure how I would like to see it implemented across the apps.
Reply
Dennis said 12:32PM on 10-07-2007
I saw a demo of a pressure-sensitive touchscreen at a major company where I was working in 1990. You could do things like changing the volume of a video playing by pressing the software volume control icon down harder to make the volume go up more, or softer to get a slight change up. (I don't recall how they made the volume go down, whether that was a different icon, etc.)
But why has it taken more than a decade and a half to start seeing more mainstream products use touch control and features like multiple simultaneous touch and pressure sensitive touch?
Reply
Henry Lowengard said 12:06PM on 10-08-2007
I hope they'd integrate the pressure UI features so that they can work with existing pressure sensitive devices. Making extended pointing device events more mainstream would be a very good thing.
The real interface I'd like to see would be a multi-touch, pressure sensitive, tactile feedback screen using e-paper as the display technology.
Reply
db cooper said 1:13PM on 10-08-2007
@Liquidmark:
The retarded mighty mouse could indeed benefit from pressure sensitivity: it would allow a user to right click without removing their other finger from the mouse. You know, the way it's possible to do on every. Other. Two button mouse. Made. Since the dawn of Time.
Only Apple could take something as simple as a right-click and overengineer it this badly.
Reply
peter x. grey said 8:20PM on 10-08-2007
Touch screen. Pressure sensitive. I'm sitting here using a laptop; I'm fine with the screen the way it is. Don't expecially want to touch it. But if it was where the keyboard was, tap it's a keyboard I can type, tap it's a DVORAK keyboard, I can type faster; tap, it's a tablet and I can write and draw with a pen. MAgic.
Reply
samfish (MSDF- Nurse Outfit!) said 5:05PM on 10-08-2007
I would buy a pressure sensitive Apple monitor in a heart beat. Drawing on my Wacom is alright, but it'll never be the same as pencil/pen and paper. Especially cool would be if you could set up a series of options on the pressure sensitivity. So, for example, you could set it so it knows you're using an actual paintbrush to interface with the screen.
Another cool thing would be a video game controller. Imagine something about the size of the iPhone that game developers could build customized button layouts per each game, for example.
Reply