28 February 2008 @ 11:28Tactile feedback for iPhone button clicks

A group of PhD students from the Computing Science Department of the University of Glasgow, Scotland have created a method for creating tactile feedback for button clicks on the iPhone’s touchscreen. By default the only feedback for button clicks on the iPhone’s screen is visual, and being visual, the click feedback is often obscured by the user’s finger. What this group has created is an interaction between button clicks and the iPhone’s built-in rotational motor.

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.

The iphone-haptics project can be downloaded from their Google code page. Installation requires a jailbroken 1.1.3 iPhone.