Check Out This Elastic Touchscreen Display

This touchscreen is something of a unique, you see its not completely flat. Or rather, you can bend it and form it with your fingers. The idea is to improve touch gestures by bringing a physical feeling to it. Whether it s a good idea or not, who knows. But it looks really nice and i would love to see something like this integrated with a Tactus screen.

Designed by MIT Media Lab’s Dhairya Dand and Rob Hemsley, Obake is what its creators consider a 2.5 dimensional interface. Formed from an elastic screen with an image projected on it from above, the Obake can detect push and pull input with a depth sensing camera and has a series of linear actuators under its surface that can alter the screen’s topography.

“One reason we haven’t yet been able to make a true 3-D display is because our perspective on displays dates back to the mouse and GUI. We have seen some previous research in the field of shape displays. . .but they all try to implement the traditional GUI gestures onto a 2.5-D display,” Dand explains. “What we need is a new way of thinking about 3-D, a new language of interaction, a new material that shatters our idea of what a display can be and can do, and yet be something out of our known surroundings and not alien. For us, an elastic display fit this bill.”

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