The future of smartphone

The new frontiers of touch.

Nokia N8 1, N900 has developed a prototype that lets you feel the consistency and texture of what appears on the screen.

The basic principle is the electrovibration: passing the finger on an insulating layer of a metal surface at alternating voltage, you can "trick" the receptors of the skin to simulate a tactile experience. The researchers placed two thin layers on the screen: a transparent conductor (indium-tin oxide) and an insulator (hafnium dioxide). When the handler is activated at certain frequencies, the finger is drawn to the screen by forces of varying intensity, which gives precisely the sensation of touching different textures. So far the feedback has not yet multitouch (the prototype can generate only one frequency at a time), but similar technologies are being studied in various laboratories.Toshiba, for example, has teamed up with Senseg 2, Finnish startup that focuses on the development of electrostatic display.

The bionic ear

the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just launched the Cell-All 5. The aim is to provide the cell with a suite of sensors that detect the presence of molecules in the air toxic chemical. The beneficiaries, according to Stephen Dennis, director of the initiative, will be both individual users that the entire community. The device is in fact designed to do two different types of "sneezing" in case of threats to personal health (such as a gas leak), the phone will make a "ECCI" as a message, ring tone or vibration, so to warn the individual concerned; in the event of potentially catastrophic events (terrorist attacks on the basis of nerve gas or highly toxic organic substances) all mobile phones will begin to send signals to the public emergency relief, so as to speed up operations to tackle and reduce the risk of false alarms.The project team already four major manufacturers of mobile phones: Qualcomm, Apple, LG and Samsung.

Like a second skin.

A flexible smartphone to wear like an electronics skin. The project is a collaboration between Nokia Research Center and 4 University of Cambridge, and is called Stretchable Electronic Skin. Using evaporated gold as a conductor, the researchers created a kind of electronic touch patch that can be pulled, bent and expanded to take various forms. Applications - explains Tapani Ryhänen, head of the trial - are potentially very large: in the future, mobile devices can be worn around the arm or a finger, and become part of our wardrobe. "