When it comes to designing a physical interface, you've got a big choice to make: Go the Blackberry route and spec out proper buttons, which offer tactility but are fixed, or go the iPhone route and opt for a touchscreen, which can display an infinite amount of menus but offer zero tactility.
That choice may soon become moot, thanks to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the novel screen they have produced. Made from latex, portions of the screen can be "pumped up" or "sucked in" using an air pump to create physical buttons. It has to be seen to be believed:
How rad is that? And if they are able to get the buttons smaller, it should be a relatively easy matter to write software that will translate visual text into Braille, opening up touchscreens for use by the visually impaired.
Leave it to the French to give us such a civilized vision of how the physical book and electronic book might someday coexist. While today we are being asked to choose between e-books we download online and physical books we might buy after a delightful conversation with our local bookseller,...
The new AR, or Augmented Reality technology doesn't look terribly different from the Virtual Reality tech that fizzed out in the '90s, but developer Canon is touting it to be useful in the realm of product design. Their bulky, spatially-aware AR headset--more like a fascia, really, that requires both hands--can...
Weekly finds from the 3D world While Carl's off on his well earned vacation, here's the first of my weekly for you guys and gals. Enjoy. Alias Hefty tutorial showing the modelling and rendering of a knife Another tutorial showing the modelling of some sweet, vaguely familiar forms Alibre New Beta for Alibre 12.0 goes...
As you know, we love clever business cards here at Core77 (see here and here), so we wanted to make sure that you saw Sparkle Lab's brilliant Paper Circuit Business Cards, packaged with all the parts you need to create a tiny circuit by following the printed placement diagram....
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