Tag Archives: Touchscreen

This Apple Watch band lets you control your smartwatch without touching the screen!

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Nobody’s ever really thought hard about this but there’s only one way to use the touchscreen on your Apple Watch – with the opposite hand. You can use either hand on your smartphone or tablet screen, but when you’ve got a watch strapped to your left-hand wrist, you can pretty much only control it with your right hand… and what do you do when the right hand’s busy holding bags, washing dishes, driving a car, wearing gloves, or petting your dog? Mudra has a pretty futuristic solution to that problem – you use sensors to control the watch without needing to touch it.

Working on a tech quite similar in outcome to the Google Soli chip found in the Pixel 4, the Mudra is a wristband for the Apple Watch that comes with its set of sensors that pick up hand gestures by measuring nerve activity in your wrist. The Mudra band allows you to use your watch without touching it, but more importantly, it gives you the ability to use your left-hand to control parts of the Watch experience, being able to snooze alarms, accept or reject calls, play/pause/skip music tracks, or even playing an old-fashioned game of Snake. The band picks up directly on gestures sent to your wrist via the motor nerve, almost forming a brain-to-device interface. State-of-the-art electrodes in the band can decode different signals, telling apart a variety of gestures that give you complete control over your watch (fun fact, Mudra translates to ‘gesture’ in Sanskrit). The band works with all generations of the Apple Watch, connecting to them via Bluetooth, and batteries inside the Mudra allow it to work for over two days before needing to be charged using a proprietary contact-based charger.

Designed to be a convenience, but with the potential of being much more, the Mudra band’s sensor technology has a wide variety of applications. Not only is it great for when your hands are occupied, it’s also extremely useful for the disabled (who can still send gesture-instructions through their motor nerves), and even offers a great way to interface with a screen without having to look at it, potentially making the Apple Watch safe to use while driving too!

Designer: Wearable Devices Ltd.

Jaguar Land Rover shows off AI-powered ‘no-touch touchscreen’ for cars

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Jaguar Land Rover and Cambridge University have developed a touchscreen system for cars that you don't actually have to touch at all. That might sound odd at first, but touchless technology concepts have been around for at least a decade, and there a...

Mercedes’ new touchscreen controls eliminate 27 physical buttons

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Today, Mercedes’ revealed its second-generation MBUX infotainment system. When it arrives in the 2021 S-Class luxury sedan, the new MBUX system will replace 27 physical hardware buttons with touchscreen controls, add new voice, hand gesture and gaze...

These Spray-on Touchscreens Work on 3D Surfaces

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From our smartphones to our laptops to our cars to our kitchen appliances, touchscreens have turned up just about everywhere. But touchscreens are generally limited to flat, squared-off surfaces. Now, a team of engineers at the UK’s University of Bristol are demonstrating a technology that could enable touch-based interfaces on all kinds of surfaces.

The technique, known as “ProtoSpray” allows for the creation of illuminated surfaces and touch sensors on three-dimensional shapes. The method uses a combination of multi-material 3D printing and a spray-on coating to add lighting and touch-sensitive interfaces to all kinds of shapes. By embedding electrodes into the 3D printed object, then spraying on an electroluminescent material, ProtoSprayed objects can both light up, and sense touch inputs. The electrodes are designed to both power the electroluminescence, and act as capacitive input sensors.

There’s more information about the process available in the team’s paper, which can be found here. If you’re interested in experimenting with ProtoSpray objects for yourself, they’ve also posted an Instructables project, which focuses primarily on the devices’ electroluminescent properties, rather than touch sensitivity.

 

[via New Atlas]

Samsung’s 4K OLED Chromebook arrives on April 6th for $999

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When Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook arrived at CES 2020 with a beautiful body and 13.3-inch 4K OLED display, we were smitten. Now, it's finally set to arrive at Best Buy in the US on April 6th starting at $999 (in Fiesta Red or Mercury Gray), according...

The Bastron Glass Keyboard is sleek and has an integrated touchpad, but it isn’t for everyone

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Here’s the dilemma. I absolutely love tactility. I hate touchscreen keyboards just because they’re so difficult to use, but at the same time, I see a very conscious effort on the part of tech companies to move towards them. It won’t be long before laptops will come with touchscreen keyboards instead of tactile ones (Microsoft’s actually working on one right now), so it’s probably prudent to look into touchscreen keyboards, just because the tech world is undeniably moving towards that future.

The Bastron Glass Touch Smart Keyboard looks great and surely feels futuristic. I’m just not sure if, in the case of people who type a lot for a living, that’s necessarily a good thing. The wired keyboard, measuring at just 0.28 inches in height (that’s thinner than the average smartphone), comes with an aluminum base and a tempered glass upper with the key layout screen-printed onto it. The capacitive touch keyboard does have built-in vibration and audio feedback that chimes in every time you type, but they don’t really replace the joy of key travel and the clicking sound caused by physical keys striking down on a PCB as you type. Where the Bastron really offers something different is in its number pad, which also comes with the ability to transform into a touch-sensitive trackpad. In doing so, the Bastron offers the kind of one-surface productivity you’d get from laptops, but for a desktop. Moreover, I could rally behind the fact that it’s splash-resistant, dust-proof, and can be wiped with a single swoop of a microfiber cloth. That itself may appeal to a certain demographic of people, but it’s a difficult sell to people who still love high-travel, tactile keyboards. Maybe in a future where flat, touchscreen keyboards are more of a norm.

Designer: Bastron