One of the drawbacks with touch-screens is that unless you look at where your finger’s going, you don’t know if you’ve touched the right place.
But Bosch has found a way of putting a stop to that. Launched at the Consumer Electronics Show is a haptic interface which, despite using a flat screen, presents your fingers with the feeling of touching an actual button.
It also responds to different kinds of touch. So if your stock response to a misbehaving smartphone is to jab harder at its screen, at long last there’s a system that will understand.
As well as feeling like you’ve got your finger on a physical button, there’ll also be various lights and sounds to tell you what the interface thinks you’re doing. All of this is designed to let you keep your eyes on the road while operating your stereo and so on.
In the words of Bosch’s Manfred Boden, this ‘combines the simple operation of mechanical buttons with the advantages of a touch screen, significantly enhancing ease of operation.’
Whether you’ll need any of this while your future car’s driving itself autonomously is a different matter, of course.
Just in case, though, Bosch is working on that subject too. It’s partnering an as-yet unidentified car maker to deliver 100% autonomous parking within the next three years.
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