Apple has been granted a patent (number 10,942,571) for a laptop with “discrete haptic regions” that hints at future Mac laptops with more buttons and sliders that could appear and vanish from the portable’s frame based on haptic (touch) input.
Basically, what Apple envisions is a touchpad and other controls that you could touch-summon when needed. A virtual keyboard on a Mac laptop is also possible.
In the patent data, Apple says that recent advances in portable computing have included providing users with a haptic feedback to indicate that a touch or a force has been received by the portable computing device. Examples of haptic feedback include a vibrating cover on a mobile phone, or a vibration or “click” output from a trackpad on a laptop computing device.
As electronic devices become more compact and sophisticated, the surface area available to provide input and output shrinks. Likewise, the ability of a user to distinguish between haptic outputs on compact devices is diminished, especially when haptic outputs are provided to an entirety of the device’s housing, cover, or the like.
Apple’s idea is for a laptop with discrete haptic output in separate regions of its housing. These regions may both accept input and provide haptic output. Typically, a haptic output provided in a first region (e.g., a “discrete haptic region”) is imperceptible to a user touching an abutting region.
2 Comments
Comments are closed.