Apple’s revolutionary pressure-based displays to usher in new touch UI paradigm

“By adding a more realistic sense of touch to its iPhone, Apple Inc may have conquered a technology that has long promised to take us beyond merely feeling the cold glass of our mobile device screens,” Jeremy Wagstaff and Michael Gold report for Reuters. “In its latest iPhones, Apple is expected to include what it calls Force Touch, allowing users to interact more intuitively with their devices via a pressure-sensitive screen which mimics the feel and response of real buttons. In the long run, the technology also promises new or better applications, from more lifelike games and virtual reality to adding temperature, texture and sound to our screens.”

“Apple hasn’t disclosed what it will announce at an event on Wednesday, but reports have said it will unveil new iPhones incorporating a version of the Force Touch technology already in some laptop touchpads and its Watches,” Wagstaff and Gold report. “‘Here we go again. Apple’s done it with gyroscopes, accelerometers, they did it with pressure sensors, they’ve done it with compass, they’ve been great at expediting the adoption of these sensors,’ said Ali Foughi, CEO of US-based NextInput, which has its own technology, trademarked ForceTouch. ‘Apple is at the forefront.'”

“Haptic technology – a tactile response to touching an interface – isn’t new, even in mobile devices. Phones have long vibrated to alert users of incoming calls in silent mode, or when they touch an onscreen button. But efforts to go beyond that have been limited,” Wagstaff and Gold report. “Apple seems to have solved such problems, experts said, judging from their trackpads and the Watch. Indeed, the trackpad carries the same sensation of a physical click of its predecessors, but without the actual pad moving at all.”

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MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s so-called competitors. Forever struggling, and routinely failing, to keep up.