A tip of the hat to Matt from The Block for this peek into the future of “tactile, immersive, two-handed” input devices.

The TactaPad replaces your mouse (and, judging by the photo, your keyboard as well) with a squishy green pad that apparently acts as a tactile representation of the items on your computer screen. You interact with these items by tapping, dragging, and pressing the appropriate spot on the pad. A silhouette of your hands is projected over the screen to locate your hand position and help your fingers find a desired object. That all seems like pretty standard trackpad-like behavior (except for the ghostly hands on your screen!), but check out this wrinkle:

When you touch the TactaPad, the tactile response you feel is designed to fit the task. Pressing a button gives you a firm fall-through sensation that let’s you know it was pressed. A disabled button is stiff and buzzes, to let you know that your press is being ignored.

So, the pad responds with tactile sensations that supplement visual and aural cues as to what is happening (or not happening) with your applications. There’s a great demonstration of how the pad works — and watching this drained most of the cynical skepticism out of me. It’s actually quite intriguing. Probably much more useful for graphics applications and tasks. Still, I can think of a lot ways in which an additional tactile element could improve interactions with even standard applications like Word and Excel.

The bad news? You can’t buy it — and even if you could, it will set you back $1000. Maybe they should offer a one-hand version?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 10:51 am and is filed under Usability, Finds.