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What if your phone could change its texture? What if your screen could create physical buttons, or provide pinpoint haptic feedback? There is technology that could deliver that for us. It’s probably a long way off, but the concept is amazing.

If you have ever had a phone with a physical, QWERTY keyboard… you probably understand how great those are. It took away from the screen size, but at the time those were popular… we had no use for a larger screen. Now that we have Smartphones, with games and such, we can’t get enough of the larger screens. Yet, now and then, we all wish those physical keyboards could somehow be worked into our slim, sleek devices.

Perhaps, with this new technology, we can. What’s being called ‘shape changing plastic’ has the ability to manipulate itself on a very small scale. The technology, which utilizes electrostriction, basically applies an electrical field to your touchscreen. In doing so, the material the screen is made of reacts to the charge, and the varied charge can create texture.

The actual material of the screen is different, of course. It is a polymer which can be manipulated by “as much as 10%”. The only information on it is that it is a “high-strain electromechanical material”, and will re-form itself quickly after manipulation. This has usually been a compromise; we either got material that could be manipulated, but reformed slowly… or had limited formation properties, while keeping its shape well.

Tons of cool things are possible with this technology. Take, for instance, gaming. If, while playing a game, the actual physical interaction of your device could change… it would add a layer of enjoyment we’ve not yet imagined. Skateboarding over rough cement, or walking through mud… even flying into a headwind. All that could be realized in much better detail than our current method of altered game physics. We’d actually feel what we’re doing, not just experience it.

Accessibility

Shape changing plastic has a much deeper impact than many of us may realize, also. Think of those who need a little assistance functioning in society, under the parameters it has set forth. Some of us get by with a little help from our friends, or in this case… devices.

How many signs do you see in braille? Not many, I’m sure. A pinpoint haptic feedback screen could be manipulated into braille, adding a layer of functionality to society for our blind citizens. While audible feedback is handy, braille on a touchscreen could make things much more discoverable for them. As our tech world becomes more ingrained with our physical one, simple tasks we may take for granted, like stopping outside a restaurant to read a menu, could become available for a greater number of people. The GPS would know your position, and offer to give you the restaurant info and menu.

Conclusion

Things that make life better also have the ability to make it simpler. Even though this technology is still in its infancy, it is absolutely one we should keep an eye on. Passive polymer such as this has the ability to do much more than enhance touch, as the video below demonstrates. The audio quality produced isn’t fantastic, but it’s a good start.

Will we ever see something as cool as a 3D model, popping from our mobile device screen? That’s hard to say. To be fair, we didn’t think a device screen could manipulate itself. There was also a time we didn’t think tilting a device could result in action, or viewing a web page could be done in a mobile environment. The future is an exciting place, and we’re all going.

Tactus Technology has been showing off more of its morphing touchscreen technology at CES 2013. This time the company brought along a 7-inch Android based tablet, showing how a physical keyboard can be made to appear on the screen to aid users typing. But as we can’t all be there to get our hands on the device, Tactus has also released a new video to show off its interesting technology.

We had our first look at the Tactus Morphing Tactile display in another video last June, which walked us through the ideas behind the morphing touchscreen. The new video shows us what we can expect to see when using the morphing display in real world scenarios.

Watching the keys rise out of the screen is pretty damn cool, it seems like something out of a science fiction film, but it has practical merits too. The raised key positions should help solve the occasional problem of miss-clicking when typing, as well as making it feel more familiar to using a traditional keyboard.

If you’re interested in how this technology works, you should know that the morphing touchscreen contains tiny pockets of fluid under the screen. These pockets can be inflated by increasing the pressure of the fluid. As the pressure increases, the fluid pushes up against the screen, causing it to rise in pre-designated places.

As well as keyboards and phone dialling buttons, the Tactus display could also be used to add gamepad controls to tablets. The developers are trying to work on a way to create a more flexible touchscreen, which would allow different applications to morph the screen according to their own needs.

Tactus hasn’t commented on which future devices we will see utilizing the morphing touchscreen display, but the company is expecting mass production to begin at the end of 2013 or at the start of 2014. Would you be interested in owning a phone or tablet with a morphing display?

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Nokia has run an online poll on their official blog, asking people whether they prefer a QWERTY keyboard, a touchscreen, a number keypad, or voice control as their favorite way of controlling their device. The data may seem surprising at first, considering how many of us today cannot imagine using anything but a touchscreen as our preferred input method. But when you realize where this is coming from, it’s not so surprising anymore. It is, in fact, expected.

Nokia’s data shows that the majority of users prefer QWERTY keyboards —  almost half of the online respondents on their site, at 48.64%. The touchscreen-loving people make up a pretty distant 34.69%, while  number keypad and voice control get 8.91% and 7.75%, respectively.

Let’s take this with a grain of salt. I think this data may not be very relevant for either today’s markets nor future smarphone users. Look where the data is coming from: Nokia’s official blog. It’s a company that, so far, has not yet mastered the touchscreen phone. Nokia still sells a lot of phones with either a QWERTY keyboard (they used to have some really popular devices with it) and the number keypad.

It’s quite expected that Nokia fans and users — the vast majority of them who aren’t used to Nokia selling and promoting touchscreen phones — would say they prefer QWERTY over touchscreens, because that’s all they know coming from Nokia. It’s almost like RIM doing a poll right now for their users and asking them if they prefer using a keyboard or a touchscreen. I think we all know what the majority of them would say.

There is an inherent problem with doing polls like these for your own customers (and make no mistake, both Nokia and RIM have been asking their users questions like these for years). When the rules of the market change, and “something else” is the future of the market, the vast majority of your users, if asked, would still say they prefer the old way of doing things. At least this is the case in the first few years after the rules start changing.

It’s human nature to dislike change, and in the beginning, only the “early adopters” get on board.

This is why both Nokia and RIM have been blind for years about the fact that neither Symbian nor the BlackBerry OS were good enough for the new age of the touchscreens. Most of their customers are still telling them that they want to keep doing things the same way, and to change nothing. But look where that has gotten both Nokia and RIM. They’re almost to the point of bankruptcy. That’s because sooner or later, the new way of doing things will start chipping away at the old way of doing things, and people move on.

So are there people out there that still prefer QWERTY keyboards? Definitely. Does Nokia’s poll represent the whole market currently, or more importantly the future of the market? Definitely not.

The future of phones is in touchscreens, and that should’ve been obvious to all phone manufacturers from the day the iPhone came out. Android entering the scene only accelerated this trend greatly. Plus, as time goes by — and as virtual keyboards become better and better — more QWERTY keyboard lovers will start switching to touchscreen phones. It’s inevitable.

Image credit: QWERTY keyboard / Shutterstock

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Ever since the touchscreen revolution, smartphone users who often send messages and emails have found that the lack of a physical keyboard makes fast and accurate typing much of a hassle.

Obviously, those users were much inclined to use BlackBerry smartphones for their typing mania, although there are several notable Android smartphone who featured a full QWERTY physical keyboard as well (the Motorola Droid series is the best example I can think of at the moment).

The problem encountered by most users when using touchscreen keyboards is that such keyboards lack tactile feedback: visual differentiators do exist, but your fingers can’t tell if they’re above one key, the other, or somewhere in the middle. Fortunately, we might be only a couple of years away from the definitive solution to this problem, as Tactus Technology has recently announced that they are working on a touchscreen prototype with shape shifting physical keys. I know, way cool, right?

I’m not a psychic, but I’m willing to bet that the question on everyone’s lips right about now is “how does it work?”. No, it’s not magic, nor is it alien technology. Instead, Tactus are using a technology called “microfluidics” to circulate and trap a transparent liquid inside predefined channels. The liquid will create a uniform bump in the deformable membrane it is contained in, and voila, you’ve got yourself a transparent physical keyboard. When you want to dismiss the keyboard, the fluid retracts and the membrane is lowered. The “raising” and “lowering” of the fluid will supposedly only take a few seconds.

The biggest current limitation is the fact that the keys can be formed only in the predefined channels that the manufacturer has set up (say, a QWERTY keyboard), but Tactus engineers are working on a way to make these patterns more flexible so that each app can create its own physical buttons.

In addition, another drawback is the fact that (at the current state of the technology) the channels are still visible even when the keys are down. Some believe that the fluid layer and the flexible membrane might damage the overall display quality, but please bear in mind that this tech is still in its pre-beta (aka alpha) phase and, as with all revolutionary tech, time will iron out the disadvantages it faces in the concept stage.

All worries about extensive power consumption should be dismissed, as Craig Ciesla, CEO and co-founder of Tactus Technology has announced that no more than 2 percent of the battery will be drained in a full day’s use.

Here’s an official video showcasing this exciting new tech:

Drawbacks aside, this technology will surely change the way we control smartphones and tablets, just give it a couple of years. Expected to hit the market by the end of 2013, this tech will not only change the way we type on our smartphones, but also the smartphone/tablet gaming sector, as the microfluid can be programmed to raise in the form of an analog button pad. However, there is still a long way to go before the fluid system will be able to measure variations in pressure.

Although Tactus’s microfluid system still has to overcome many of the obstacles it faces on the road towards mass-adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if major Android device manufacturers (think HTC, Samsung, LG) will adopt this tech in one form or the other by the end of next year.

What do you guys think? Is this exactly the tech that physical QWERTY keyboard fans need to finally make the jump to touchscreen-only devices? Let us know in the comment section below!

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