A multitouch keyboard with tactile and sound feedback to make it sound like a physical QWERTY keypad has just been demoed, and it could be headed to a touchscreen smartphone near you.
Haptic feedback on a touchscreen is nothing new, but Immersion’s TouchSense technology demoed at the All Things D conference in the US yesterday goes one better by allowing you to feel the keys as you move across the letters, rather than just when you push one. In other words, you’ve got a multitouch tactile keyboard bringing you all the power emailing benefits of a BlackBerry on a touchscreen phone.
If the word “iPhone” springs to mind when you hear multitouch, we might not be far off: Immersion also demoed a cheesy haptic feedback emoticon app on an iPhone, and the company’s CTO actively avoided any questions about the multitouch tactile tech appearing on Nokia or Palm smartphones in the future.
What we’d most like to see though? Multitouch technology like TouchSense on full size keyboards. We’ve speculated before that Apple could look to create something like this for Macs, letting you touchtype without looking: we’ve got our fingers crossed an exec or two from Cupertino is at the conference and paying attention.
Out TBC | £TBC | Immersion (Via All Things D)
