Microfluidics panel could add physical buttons to a touch screen

Tactus Technology has created a microfluidics panel that could be overlaid on touchscreens to produce “buttons,” per a report from CNET. The panel would allow smartphones to create a bunch of nubs over the keyboard keys on touch screens to help guide typists’ fingers.

Some smartphone users are still lamenting the loss of tactile keys like those on a Blackberry, but QWERTY keyboards are hard to justify in terms of real estate when a touch screen can use that space better. A keyboard add-on is a possibility, but one pretender to the Blackberry throne, the Typo, has gotten a mixed reception.

Tactus’ system would put a 0.75 to 1 millimeter-thick microfluidics panel over a device’s LCD instead of glass or plastic. A sub-layer of the panel would be punctured with 200-nanometer holes, through which fluid would be pressed to raise the flexible surface of the screen when the operating system called up some buttons.

Per Tactus’ whitepaper, the buttons can be any shape and can vary in height and rigidity, depending on the fluid pressure applied. Tactus says little about how the panel might affect the visibility of the LCD, but the company says that it can match the fluid’s optical index of refraction to “that of the surrounding material” so that light will pass through the raised buttons evenly.