Haptics: Adding Vibration To Your iPhone Keyboard

Posted by Jake Brooks on March 3, 2008 at 8:29 pm

Haptics is a new iPhone only application developed by a group of PhD students from the Computing Science Department of the University of Glasgow. Because the iPhone has a touchscreen it lacks the tactile response from a normal key button. The tool, haptics, adds a weak level of vibration every time you touch a key on the keyboard. The group was able to adjust the level of the vibration to add a small but noticeable vibration to each key.

A quote that gives a more thorough explanation:

One of the key features lost in touchscreen interaction is the ability to feel the buttons. For instance, although touchscreen keyboards are based on physical keyboard designs, they do not produce the natural haptic response which occurs when a button is touched. There have been recent studies into the use of mobile touchscreen devices and the incorporation of virtual tactile feedback with fingertip interaction (1). It has been shown that tactile feedback can be added to button presses using standard mobile phone vibrotactile actuators and can be beneficial to mobile device users, increasing typing speeds and reducing errors.

You can download the tool here iPhone Haptics

(Sources: iPhone Haptics)