Two Touching New Ways to Interact with Gadgets
LOS ANGELES — We celebrate the innovations of touch screens, which have made computing that much more haptic. But when it comes to interacting with our devices, the use of touch remains remarkably, well, untapped.
LOS ANGELES — We celebrate the innovations of touch screens, which have made computing that much more haptic. But when it comes to interacting with our devices, the use of touch remains remarkably, well, untapped.
Enter Feel Me, an upcoming app developed by Copenhagen-based Marco Triverio. Seeking a way to enhance how he socialize, he developed an interface that allows you to tap on your screen. On their phone, your friend sees a dot exactly where your finger is. If he or she touches it, the dot lights up and the phone vibrates, indicating a connection.
“Depending on the context,” he notes in his explanation video, beta testers “have used it as a soft, gentle connection or as a playful link with the person on the other side.”
And then there’s the Cryoscope, developed by LA’s own Robb Godshaw, who also works on Syynlabs (the folks who brought us the amazing OK Go Rube Goldberg machine video). Touching on the notion that we feel weather rather than understand as abstract data points, he created a box that actually heats up and cools down.
Big whoop, right? You can just reach your hand out the window. But in a cubicle-filled world, the device makes some sense. It makes even more sense for travelers. After just a month in Los Angeles, I’ve forgotten what anything below 60°F (16°C) feels like. With a range of 0°F to 100°F (-18°C to 38°C), Cryoscope makes that brisk air feel in a faraway city that much more real.
