Apple News

After successfully implementing dual touch on touch pads and more recently on the iPhone and iPod touch in touch screens apple is now trying to further revolutionize how you and I interact with our portable devices and handhelds. The buzz is that Apple is exploring touch sensitiveness on devices that also react to the pressure applied and not just touch, the intricacies and details of the technology patent that apple had filed early this year in March but published only on Thursday can be found here.

According to the patent filed by apple for a “Force Imaging Input and Device System”, today’s touch screens and touch pads as limited by their relatively simple input, which track just the location of the finger or stylus on the surface. A method of detecting the strength of the user’s input would add a new element of control.

“One drawback to using touch pads as input devices is that they do not generally provide pressure or force information,” the company writes. “Force information may be used as another input dimension for purposes of providing command and control signals to an associated electronic device.”

Brian Huppi and Steven Hotelling the inventors of this patented technology suggest to place a set of traces linked in sort of a sandwich like spring membrane below the touch pads. This would allow the membrane to create a second image in response to the pressure and the image shall respond to the amount of pressure applied at a given point. The higher the pressure, the closer the membrane shall be to the conducive elements and the greater the pressure registered.

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