The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become a shape-shifter, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert in situations where visual and audible cues won鈥檛 do.
, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone 鈥� 鈥� using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.
Pressure plates on the device detect how much force is being applied to the casing, while the motors control the amount of resistance exerted in response. Because the resistance can be tweaked, the degree of squishability can be controlled by some aspect of the phone鈥檚 status to provide some basic feedback without demanding the attention of eyes or ears.
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For example, after the battery is fully charged, the phone might feel as taut as a glutton鈥檚 post-lunch belly, while a gadget running on empty might be as easy to squeeze as a stress ball. Alternatively, the stiffness could convey the number of emails marked as important that have arrived in a user鈥檚 inbox.
鈥淵ou can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status 鈥� ring level, messages 鈥� without having to look at it,鈥� says Patel.
Squish test
In trials, Patel asked 10 people to test seven different uses of SqueezeBlock. They were able to distinguish up to four levels of squishiness, suggesting it could provide a basic way of checking battery charge, for instance.
The work was presented at the in New York last week.
Shwetak鈥檚 team isn鈥檛 alone in exploring how a handset鈥檚 physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, , a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphone. His phone 鈥渋nhales鈥� and 鈥渆xhales鈥� at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.
Hemmert is now exploring how tactile feedback could provide further cues. He has devised mechanisms that enable mobile devices to change their shape and even their weight.
This way
His shape-shifting device uses motors to move the handset鈥檚 panels apart, creating a wedge shape. Feeling that one side of the phone is thicker than then other could alert the user that there is additional content available that the screen is too small to show but which can be found in the thicker direction, says Hemmert. For instance, if a user was scrolling horizontally through a photographic slideshow, the phone鈥檚 right-hand side would gradually thin and the left-hand side would thicken.
A different handset, meanwhile, houses a weight resting on two perpendicular runners, so that it can be moved in two dimensions. Our hands are remarkably adept at detecting shifts in balance, says Hemmert, so that when used in conjunction with a mapping application, the phone鈥檚 centre of balance can move in the direction a user should travel to reach a desired destination. This would allow people to navigate a foreign city without having to actually look at the map 鈥� helping them take in the sights while avoiding collisions with the locals. Hemmert is presenting the work at the in Reykjavik, Iceland, this week.
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