Translucent Tactile Overlay for Touch Display Haptic Feedback
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Solution Overview
Problem
Touch sensitive displays in handheld electronic devices lack tactile feedback, making it difficult for users to accurately actuate inputs, requiring more attention and increasing the likelihood of errors.
Innovation Solution
Incorporating translucent elongated tactile structures overlying the display that provide haptic feedback during actuation, allowing users to distinguish between visual elements and ensuring correct input locations, while maintaining minimal visual distortion.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If a touch sensitive display is used to provide visual output and input capability, then the device integrates display and input functions, but tactile feedback is insufficient making accurate actuation difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The overlay is segmented into multiple discrete tactile structures (raised portions) positioned at specific locations corresponding to visual elements. Each tactile structure provides localized tactile feedback for its associated visual element, allowing users to distinguish between densely packed elements through touch while maintaining the integrated display-input function.
Solution Approach 2:
Tactile feedback is applied locally at specific positions on the display surface where visual elements are displayed. The raised tactile structures create localized variations in surface topology that provide haptic cues corresponding to specific visual elements, enhancing ease of operation at critical interaction points without affecting the entire display surface.
2Measurement precision
If tactile structures are added to provide haptic feedback, then user input accuracy is improved, but visual distortion increases
Solution Approach 1:
A thin translucent overlay film is used to carry the tactile structures. The overlay is sufficiently thin and flexible that it can be formed with raised portions while maintaining optical transparency, allowing users to see visual elements through the overlay with minimal distortion while still receiving tactile feedback from the raised structures.
Solution Approach 2:
The overlay material is made translucent rather than opaque, allowing visual elements to be seen through it. This translucent property minimizes visual distortion and information loss while the surface topology changes (raised portions) provide the necessary tactile feedback for accurate input.
3Measurement precision
If more tactile structures are added to distinguish visual elements, then input accuracy improves, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The tactile feedback mechanism is merged with the display overlay itself. The same translucent film that covers the display also contains the raised tactile structures, combining protective covering, visual display medium, and haptic feedback elements into a single integrated component rather than adding separate complex mechanisms.
Solution Approach 2:
The tactile structures replicate or correspond to the arrangement of visual elements on the display. By creating physical raised portions that mirror the visual layout, users can tactilely locate elements without requiring additional complex positioning systems or mechanisms.
Data Source
AI summary
An improved handheld electronic device has a touch sensitive display which comprises a number of elongated tactile structures that are haptically detectable by a user. Various routines executable on the handheld electronic device can cause visual elements to be output in various predetermined arrangements with respect to the arrangement of the tactile structures in order to facilitate input.