Ondrej Holzman That it's a bit of magic, we're already talking about the new Force Touch trackpad in MacBooks they wrote. Now, apps are slowly starting to swarm to prove that the new haptic trackpad isn't just about actually clicking/not clicking, it's going to offer a lot more. Even though MacBook displays are not touch-sensitive, you can practically touch the pixels on the screen via the Force Touch trackpad.
The magic element in the new trackpad is the so-called Taptic Engine, a technology developed in laboratories for twenty years. The electromagnetic motor under the glass surface can make your fingers feel like something is not really there. And it's far from just clicking, which doesn't really happen mechanically on the Force Touch trackpad.
Technology from the 90s
The gró of the tactile trick comes from Margareta Minská's dissertation in 1995, which investigated lateral force texture simulation, as on Twitter he hinted former Apple designer Bret Victor. Minská's key finding at the time was that our fingers often perceive the action of a lateral force as a horizontal force. Today, in MacBooks, this means that the right horizontal vibration under the trackpad will produce a downward clicking sensation.
Minská from MIT was not the only one working on similar research. Apparent cranks due to horizontal forces were also investigated by Vincent Hayward at McGill University. Apple has now – as is its habit – managed to translate years of research into a product that can be used by the average user.
"It's, in Apple style, really well made," he said pros Wired Hayward. "There is a lot of attention to detail. It's a very simple and very smart electromagnetic motor," explains Hayward, whose first similar device, created in the 90s, weighed roughly the same as an entire MacBook today. But the principle was the same then as it is today: creating horizontal vibrations that the human finger perceives as vertical.
Plastic pixels
"Bumpy pixels", loosely translated as "plastic pixels" - so he described his experience with the Force Touch trackpad Alex Gollner, who edits video and was one of the first to try what tactile feedback can do in his favorite iMovie tool. "Plastic pixels" because we can feel them under our hands.
Apple was the first (besides system applications where Force click is functional) to show in iMovie how the Force Touch trackpad can be used for previously unknown functions. “When I stretched the length of the clip to its maximum, I felt a small bump. Without looking at the timeline, I 'felt' that I had reached the end of the clip," Gollner described how haptic feedback in iMovie works.
The small vibration that makes your finger feel an "obstacle" on the otherwise perfectly flat trackpad is certainly just the beginning. Until now, the display and trackpad were two separate components of MacBooks, but thanks to the Taptic Engine, we will be able to touch the content on the display using the trackpad.
According to Hayward, in the future, interacting with a trackpad can be "more realistic, more useful, more fun, and more enjoyable," but now it's all up to UX designers. A group of researchers at Disney for example creates touch screen, where larger folders become more difficult to handle.
Apparently, the Ten One Design studio became the first third-party developer to take advantage of the Force Touch trackpad. It announced update for your software Inklett, thanks to which graphic designers in applications such as Photoshop or Pixelmator can draw on trackpads using pressure-sensitive styluses.
Since the trackpad itself is now also pressure sensitive, Ten One Design promises "amazing pressure regulation" that will even let you draw with just your finger in a pinch. Although the Inklet has already been able to distinguish the pressure with which you write with the pen, the Force Touch trackpad adds reliability to the whole process.
We can only look forward to what other developers can do with the new technology. And what haptic response will bring us to the iPhone, where it will most likely go.
I hope it will be a new feature in the iPhone 6s, I would definitely go for it and even though I have a 6, I would definitely buy a 6s.
This is a touchpad feature (Force Touch trackpad) and I can't imagine how this could work on iPhones in the foreseeable future. Certainly not with the current form of construction.
iPhone 6s will have a sensitive display just like the apple watch, it doesn't matter if you can't imagine it, the important thing is that apple can make it :D
But this article talks more about vibrations, which, as far as I know, the Apple Watch will not have.
The Apple Watch has a Taptic Engine, although I don't know how it will be with touches, but the vibrations will appear at least during navigation, notifications and when sending a heartbeat
yep... i didn't mean they don't have vibration at all, i meant they won't use it for force touch in such a way that you'll think you clicked... it'll either be a stupid vibration or nothing ;)
That's right, it's about vibrations in the touchpad, which is quite different from the display. In addition, none of us have held the AW in our hands yet, let alone arguing about what the 6S will look like. And there is a lot of doubt about this variant - Apple can't even produce something like this in such a quantity.
I consider this to be very revolutionary, it's definitely great for me and I'm looking forward to what possibilities it will bring. I switched to a Mac then precisely because of gestures, because it speeds up work rapidly and I see this as a completely new level where we can push it even further.