Tactus Technology Shows Us Their New Keyboard Tech [CES 2014]

One particular piece of technology caught my attention at least year’s CES which was a creation from Tactus Technology. Tactus has managed to address a gripe that many of us had when switching from feature phones to smartphones; the loss of tactile feedback while typing on a touchscreen keyboard. Through the magic of science, Tactus places a film on top of the existing touchscreen and then when a keyboard function is detected, a physical keyboard will rise up from the screen to provide tactile feedback for typing purposes; that much was show at CES 2013. At CES 2014 though, it looks like Tactus has taken their creation to the next level.

Tactility of the home, menu and back keys are generally not an issue for phones which have soft keys that are separate to the screen. However, many manufacturers, such as LG, have begun to adopt onscreen soft keys which can make pressing those keys a little less tactile than desired and have the added danger of bumping and activating the soft keys. What Tactus has implemented, which is shown in the above photo, are not only tactile keys for the soft function key, but the ability to program a ‘long press’ threshold that defines how long (or short) the button needs to be pressed before a press is registered.

Their next experiment provides a rather unorthodox method of providing tactile feedback; instead of working out different ways of creating raised keys, the concept pictured above is of Tactus new concept keyboard which raises the space between the keys to create grooved and trenched keys. While this is unintuitive at first glance, trying to use the keyboard in this format was actually remarkably easy, both using the standard two thumb typing as well as Swype-ing. These trenched keys act not dissimilarly to the frets of a guitar, guiding your finger to the correct location and Tactus has observed that accuracy and typing speed is actually slightly increased using this concept rather than their original concept.

Tactus had one last concept to show us which was very much in the prototype stage which involved a hardware add-on that allowed the user to control when the raised keys would appear. The kit would simply include the additional layer to be placed on the screen and the add on which would be added to the side of the device in question. The sale of this implementation of the Tactus technology will be handled by a third-party and is expected to be released sometime after mid 2014. That’s pretty exciting news to hear that this futuristic technology is going to be available so soon, and while Tactus was reluctant to name any specific devices that would be supported by this add-on, it would be a safe bet to think that there will be at least one Android device in there somewhere.

For more information about Tactus Technology, visit their website at www.tactustechnology.com

Note: stay tuned to see our video of the Tactus keyboards in action. To be added soon…