Future Fone-tastic
Transparent touchscreens! Flexible phones! Handsets that turn into full-fledged PCs! The little gizmo you hold in your hand today might be unrecognisable to you in the near future
At the start of this millennium, the mobile phone did not have a camera, its screen wasn’t in full colour, and the touchscreen interface was a distant dream. As for dual-core processors, that technology hadn’t even reached the PC at the turn of the century.
Would you have believed it then if someone told you that in 10 short years, the brick-like device in your hand would be transformed into a mobile PC with a snazzy interface and thousands of apps and games at your disposal?
It will probably sound just as ridiculous if we tell you that in another 10 years, the cellphone will mutate into a device with a transparent, flexible touchscreen that will be operated without you ever taking it out of your pocket – and if you did, it would use builtin projectors to transform itself into a full-fledged desktop PC. Yet, that’s exactly where scientists are looking to take that tiny, ubiquitous gizmo we have all come to rely on as an extension of ourselves.
Flexible screens
Imagine a phone whose touchscreen can bend. You can set it up like a projector, or wear it like a wristwatch, or simply fold it in half to make it appear like a regular phone – only to unfold it into a large-screen mobile device.
That’s the future we are headed towards with the wonderful innovations in flexible display technology. Manufacturers such
as Nokia and Samsung have already shown off prototypes of phones running on flexible screens.
At the recent Nokia World 2011 event in London, the company took the covers off the Nokia Kinetic Device – a handheld mobile with a flexible screen and body. Users could bend and twist the phone’s edges to activate functions such as playing the next track or switching apps.
Much earlier, in January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Samsung also touted a prototype device with a bendy screen. Since then, a concept phone called the Galaxy Skin has captured the internet’s imagination with its eye-popping visuals. Samsung has gone on to say that it is looking at producing flexible handsets in 2012.
NanoTouch
Touchscreens are undoubtedly the future of mobile devices. They allow for bigger screens while
keeping the size of the gizmo to a minimal. But they have one flaw: When using such a device, your fingers inadvertently block some portion of the screen. This can be quite a problem if the screen is small, like say on Apple’s iPod Nano – or if the user has big fingers.
The solution? Access the touchscreen from behind the device. Think about it: Your finger is no longer obscuring that tiny icon you want to press or the key you are trying to type on.
Apparently a bunch of brainiacs at Microsoft Research have been working on such a technology since 2008. Researcher Patrick Baudisch and his group call it the NanoTouch project. Essentially, the team fitted a capacitive touchpad on the back of a prototype touchscreen device. When the finger comes in contact with the touchpad, the screen on the front shows a corresponding virtual representation of it. The end result is pseudo-transparency as the virtual finger looks like it’s your finger behind the screen.
Pressing down on the back lets you ‘click’, complete with tactile and auditory feedback.
The sensitivity of this touchpad is such that it detects the movement of your finger in real time, relaying the information to the virtual finger on the screen to make for a seamless, intuitive experience. (Besides, there’s something really cool about seeing your fingers behind the screen).
“In a study, participants completed a pointing task successfully across all display sizes – from 2.4 inches to 0.3 inches – when using the NanoTouch interface,” Baudisch notes in a paper on the project.
It’s a little similar to what Motorola has done with a few phones such as its Charm and Backflip, but NanoTouch is the next level of the technology, offering higher sensitivity and a combination of the touchpad and virtual finger that makes it seem like the real thing.
It’s not yet come to the point where it’s a completely transparent screen, but the pseudo-transparency is convincing enough.
PocketTouch
It can be quite bothersome to access the mobile phone in your jeans pocket, be it to cut an incoming call when you’re busy in a meeting – or to skip to the next track in your playlist when you’re travelling in a crowded train. Enter PocketTouch – another technology being worked out by Microsoft Research – that lets you control your touchscreen device through the mess in your purse or the fabric of your trousers.
The prototype uses custom capacitive sensors that enable eyes-free multi-touch input – ranging from simple touch strokes to full alphanumeric text entry – through clothing.
It also includes an orientation-defining unlock gesture to detect how the device lies in your bag. Touchscreen phones rely on careful calibration of the screen, taking into account the orientation of the device, to accurately detect what your fingers are trying to do.
“Think about a gadget that is randomly positioned in your haversack,” researcher Chris Harrison explains, “you can have a gyroscope tell if the device is facing up or down. But you really have no idea of user orientation… you still wouldn’t know from which side the user is going to approach the device.”
Once user orientation is gauged by sensors and algorithms, PocketTouch then separates purposeful finger strokes from background noise and uses them as input.
PocketTouch then processes strokes to enable text recognition of characters written over the same small physical area.
“Microsoft Windows already contains a very rich and adaptive stroke-recognition engine,” researcher Hrvoje Benko says. “So if the user is sloppy with strokes, these systems have the language model to handle it.”
In tests, the PocketTouch prototype worked perfectly well even when used with thick materials like heavy fleece or jackets.
Sparsh
Pranav Mistry, an Indian researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working on a new killer app for mobile phones that he calls Sparsh.
“Imagine you received a text message from a friend, with his residential address. You touch the message and it is conceptually copied in you – your body. Now to “paste” that address in your iPad or any other touchscreen device, all you need to do is touch that other gadget.”
Sparsh, Hindi for ‘touch’, works on cloud-based backend software, which would need to be running on both your devices (and you would need to be signed in, of course). When you touch the data on your first machine, it gets copied into your personal web space, or cloud, on Sparsh. Then when you touch another gizmo, Sparsh realises you want to pass on that data to this new machine and automates the process, opening the necessary apps.
According to Mistry, in future, you could copy pictures from your internet-capable camera to your phone or transfer a video from one phone to another, all with a seamless, natural
interaction of “touch to copy, touch to paste.”
Mozilla Seabird Concept
The mobile phone has long been touted as the ultimate convergence device – a gizmo that lets you control every aspect of your digital life. The Mozilla Seabird concept phone, developed by designer Billy May, is perhaps the ultimate realisation of this dream: A phone that turns into a full computer.
The Seabird is based on the premise that hardware and software in mobile phones is fast approaching the kind of horsepower and platform capability that a desktop computer has.
However, data input still remains a challenge on these small devices. Carrying around additional peripherals like large screens and keyboards is not really the solution to this issue.
May, therefore, decided to use the technology of pico projectors – tiny projectors that are already available in some phones – to make user interaction easier.
By placing your Seabird phone on a flat surface or in a dock, it could use the built-in technology to project a virtual keyboard, trackpad area as well as a larger display of what you see on the screen, making it a virtual portable computer.
Of course, this is just a concept, and Mozilla Labs has no intention of ever producing the phone, but the prospect alone is enough to make you start daydreaming.
(Mihir Patkar STOI 20N1111)
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