The Form Factor

Not so long ago, if you bought yourself a phone you were pretty much guaranteed that it had a number keypad on it.  This was due to a design mentality known as Form equals Function.  While this still exists in many devices, the introduction of multi-touch screens and smart devices has seen a shift away from the concepts.  Need to press a button, well we just render it on the screen for you and an App translates what you want by pressing it.

While this gives us a lot of power (the one device can do many things) we lose out in terms of Accessibility and even in Human-Computer Interface terms.

Eventually this will have accessibility benifits (for example you will put your Milk container in a special slot in your fridge which will automatically read the Use By Date and advise you when to throw it out or purchase more) but for the moment, the popularity of integrating Touch-Screens into our everyday devices is causing an accessibility problem.

This is where Haptics comes into play.

Haptics deals with any technology relating to the sense of touch.  A lot of focus at this point in time is on developing technology to appropriately reproduce the tactile feedback we were used to with physical contact (like pushing a button and it remaining depressed to indicate it was On) and representing that in a virtual sense.  Hopefully this will allow us to connect more physically to our virtual world than the flat representation we are becoming accustomed to.