Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Quick Look: Tanvas Haptic Touch Screen”.
Welcome to make workshop, where we check out tools, toys and tech built for makers today, we’re going to look at a touch screen that has haptic feedback without any moving parts. [ Applause ]: this is the canvas touch screen development kit. It’S really interesting. It’S a touch screen that gives you haptic feedback without any moving parts at all. It’S really hard to describe this on video, because it’s all about feel and touch and the sensation that you have in your fingertip, while you’re using it the best way i’ve found to kind of display it is to get the microphone really close. So you can hear it and then describe what it feels like, while you’re touching it. The sensation that you get on your finger is very similar to if you’ve ever been washing the dishes, and you have like a plastic container like a tupperware kind of thing, and you clean it up and you rub your finger across it and it makes that kind Of like burp sound or like sound, and you kind of feel that that’s kind of what it feels like on your finger, they’re using a process called electro adhesion where they’re physically changing the amount that your finger adheres to the surface as you’re moving it. There’S no vibration motor in here, but it does kind of vaguely feel like the vibration motor in a phone, but there’s no moving parts. So it’s not quite the same. It’S interesting.
They have a few demos that they ran me through, and i’m gon na show you some footage of those and it’s pretty cool, but i still feel like it’s really hard to convey the sensation when you’re, using it you’re, not feeling bumps you’re you’re feeling a variation In the surface, so you know even in a demo where you’re running your finger across this, this tarantula you’re not feeling like fur and bumps and three-dimensional stuff you’re, just feeling that it is different and it might be easy to dismiss that and say well, you know, They’Re not able to show this super high fidelity three-dimensional difference, but man, a little bit of haptic feedback goes a long way. I just keep thinking about touch, screens and cars and how i hate the fact that you can’t feel to do things on that touch. Screen anymore and being able to feel like where a button is or something like that might help you not take your focus off of the road as much.
I think it’s very cool to show kind of a visual example of what you’re feeling and how this all works. I’M gon na look look at this demo. This is a tarantula that, as i rub my hand across it, i can actually feel the legs and the body, and i don’t have to necessarily see it now. Of course, it doesn’t feel furry or three-dimensional it’s more like there’s just like some some more resistance on the screen, as i pass over a leg right there or something like that. Now my fingers are pretty calloused from you know: yard, work and woodworking and stuff like that. So i have a little bit of trouble distinguishing between like the body and the legs, but i can feel that there’s a difference there and i think that’s pretty impactful now, when you’re developing with this you’re, actually creating an image map of the texture you want.
Let me hide the visual part of this, and you can see that this is the actual texture map that you work from, and you can create different textures and different amounts by making a grayscale image for your application. For like the different buttons and different, you know kind of uh interface items. This is a development kit, so you’re not really buying this as a product. Although you do get this display, mostly what you’re doing is you’re buying a development kit to learn the api so that you can integrate this into a product you’re developing now, admittedly, that’s a very narrow group of people that watch these videos.
That would be interested in this, but i think anybody that’s developing a touch screen application should maybe look into this technology. The development kit is about two thousand dollars. You can develop in c sharp c, plus, plus or c, and then it also has like a whole slew of graphical interfaces that you can use to learn that i’ve been demoing through this video. If you want to learn more, go to canvas.com, that’s t-a-n-v-a dot, co. I hope you enjoyed the video today.
I have a whole pile of stuff sitting right behind the camera there, that i’ve got ta make videos on that are awesome. I’M really looking forward to it be sure to subscribe to this website and click the little notification bell. So that you get notified as soon as we publish the new videos, you .