OLED with pop-up buttons: New technology brings buttons to the screen | News

Apple’s patented Taptic Engine ensures touchscreen haptics after Touch haptic feedback. The user is reminded of the “real” keys. But every driver who’s ever tried to operate the touch-sensitive on-board computer while driving will know: Virtual buttons are hard to locate, often causing frustration.

Real keys port on screen
There are even many external keyboard solutions for the iPad, as the problem of the lack of tactile properties of the on-screen keyboard has not been avoided so far. Separating vision and touch allows for much faster and therefore more efficient work. So researchers in the Future Interfaces Group (FIG) at Carnegie Mellon University developed a technique called flat touches. From a post published as part of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Recently presented in Hamburg, it shows how it works.

Finally a working solution
While Apple has so far been able to simulate the movement of the keys using the Taptic Engine, the key on the screen can still be felt. In 2018, the Cupertino-based company filed a patent that uses an electrostatic charge to simulate the edge of a key (see ), but this has not yet been implemented. With flat panel touches, you can now create short-stroke spikes on the screen, which are based on the layout of the keys. Researchers have already succeeded in doing this in the past, but it is only now possible to implement this principle in a space-saving way within the panel thanks to the development of flexible OLED technology (see fig. ).

prospects
It is currently possible to raise EEOPs up to 5 mm by applying electric fields. The touch panel responsible for this is the same 1.5 mm thick. In addition, there is an equally large liquid reservoir under it. Currently “stretching” the popup takes about a second so it feels firm enough. Current OLED panels aren’t flexible enough to allow these large structures to grow, but the video below really impressively shows what’s actually possible. If the touch panel can be resized to pixel size in the future, there will be no limit to the shape and size.