Shape-changing plastic could give touchscreens real physical clicky keyboards

A few years ago, in a haptic technology conference. There was the usual array of silly gadgets that only technically fulfilled the haptic definition (a dog collar that buzzes when the dog leaves the house, a stylus that vibrates when you tap it) but buried way toward the back was a supposedly tactile touchscreen — and it worked! The device vibrated at various frequencies to basically knock your finger off the screen several times per second, effectively adjusting the friction between finger and glass. As I moved from a picture of concrete to a picture of ice, my finger seemed to slip accordingly, and while that might not be what you’d call “useful,” it certainly sold me on the concept: creative use of haptics can be more than just the Rumble Pak 2.0. It can fundamentally affect how we use these devices.

These sorts of haptic technologies are almost all trying to use vibration to simulate some other physical sensation, but what if we could actually change the friction of the surface, make it smoother or bumpier with real physical deformations? More to the point, what if we could make a keyboard that actually pops out of the screen, and which can be depressed as we type? Strategic Polymers claims it will bring a product to market next year that can do just that: pop up keys that actually click when clicked, and that do so with a ground-breaking millisecond response time.

Even Star Trek didn’t posit such advances some 300 years in the future, with even the Federation’s flagship using flat, chirpy touchscreens. The Strategic Polymers solution uses a new high-strain electromechanical material that can deform by “as much as 10%” and which responds quickly. Historically, we’ve had to choose one of those two virtues, getting either slow and meaningful responses, or quick and tiny ones. Here, Strategic Polymers claims, we’ve got a technology that will allow true, clickable keys to pop right out of the surface of your smartphone’s touchscreen, and to respond quickly and accurately. See an early video of the technology below.

The technology works via electrostriction, which is a property of every dielectric object in the world. By engineering this polymer to respond very specifically to an applied electric field, however, the researchers claim to be able to create all sorts of useful deformations — like, for instance, a couple of dozen square keyboard keys. By adjusting the applied electric field in response to touch, the screen can seem to move in response to pressure, though in reality it’s still only moving in response to the electric field, which is changing in response to touch. The result, if it all works as quickly and seamlessly as Strategic Polymers claims, would be a real physical keyboard on a fully functional touchscreen.

What is currently unclear, however, is how pre-programmed these physical features might need to be. It’s of course exciting to imagine a touchscreen that could take on a new physical controller layout for every game or application, put a rough strip down the right of the screen for a nice tactile scroll bar, or volume slider you can feel slide, or perhaps just an embossed top logo. Current info doesn’t make it clear if this will be possible, however, as the deformations might need to be built into the electroactive polymer; a keyboard could work because a reliable key layout could be built right into the polymer. The ExtremeTech logo is, unfortunately, much more up in the air.

One very interesting feature is the material’s ability to play sound. A speaker is just a highly controlled vibrating surface, really, one that creates patterns of tiny shockwaves that we interpret as sound. This haptic technology has a low enough response time that it can do this itself. Watch the video above to see how a this tech could turn just about any surface into a low-fi computer speaker.

The various layers of a touchscreen setup. Note that the LCD has 5+ layers of its own, too.

Thin and transparent, the new tech is billed as yet another in the steadily growing list of screen layers. It’s become a bit of design cliche to feature an exploded picture of a screen’s many and innovative layers, from light scattering glass to touchscreen films to, now, haptic top coats. This layer will have to be on surface of the screen, since it can’t very well push up through a layer of Gorilla Glass, and so the claims about the material’s durability will be absolutely key.

Virtually everyone who’s used a touchscreen keyboard has wished for this technology at one time or another. It calls to mind all sorts of wild and questionably useful applications, like a raised ring you can physically stick your thumb into and drag down to scroll, or a Google Maps with real topology. It’s the sort of advance that could finally drag Apple out of the “But it’s just a faster iPhone!” era, offering a the biggest step forward in touchscreen functionality since multitouch.

NASA working on faster-than-light space travel, says warp drives are ‘plausible’

Trekkies rejoice: while real breakthroughs in warp drive design haven’t happened yet, we’re moving closer to making faster-than-light travel truly feasible.

Researchers found that making adjustments to the design of a real-life warp drive first proposed by physicist Michael Alcubierre in 1994 significantly reduces the amount of energy required to power it.

Alcubierre’s design called for an American football-shaped spacecraft with a flat ring attached to the ship. Space time would warp around it, accelerating the ship to as fast as 10 times the speed of light without the ship itself ever breaking the speed of light. This would make trips to local stars a relatively quick jaunt: a trip to Alpha Centauri — some four light years away from Earth — would take just shy of five months.

Up until now, the biggest problem was that the Alcubierre warp drive required prohibitive amounts of energy to power it. That may no longer be true, say NASA researchers.

Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was able to significantly reduce the amount of energy required by altering the shape of the ring around the ship from flat to more of a rounded donut. Instead of requiring a ball of antimatter the size of Jupiter to power the theoretical warp drive, only 500 kilograms are now required, or a ball about the size of the Voyager spacecraft. White says that if the intensity of the warp bubble is oscillated, the amount of energy is reduced even more.

This is certainly exciting news, but it’s important to remember that the true breakthrough — proof that Alcubierre’s designs actually work — do not exist. Dr. White and his team of researchers have set up a miniature version of the warp drive in their labs, attempting to create small warps in space and time. While certainly on a far smaller scale, White’s work may be the beginning of real-life warp drive.

Here’s the thing though: antimatter is horribly dangerous. Just a third of a gram of the stuff interacting with matter in the wrong way could release energy equivalent to the Hiroshima blast. That means White’s Alcubierre warp drive still requires the amount of energy equivalent to 1.5 million Hiroshimas — enough to wipe civilization off the Earth.

Regardless, if we’re ever going to reach for the stars, we need to think and do things that seem a little crazy. Dr. White seems to believe that attempting to get this to work is indeed something humanity should pursue.

“The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation,” Dr. White tells Space.com. “The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab.”

Researchers print flexible electronic tattoo directly onto human skin

From the research lab that brought us stick-on electronic tattoos, and recently the stretchable battery, we now have the first electronic sensor that has been printed directly onto human skin. These sensors can directly measure skin hydration and temperature, and electric signals from muscle and brain activity.

The skin-printable sensors, created by the Rogers research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are a natural evolution of the lab’s electronic tattoos. The electronic tattoos are circuits that are affixed to an elastic polymer backing, which is then stuck to the skin (pictured above). Like temporary tattoos, though, these electronic tattoos are easily washed off in the shower or swimming pool, making them unsuitable for extended use. Now, by removing the polymer backing and printing the sensor directly onto the skin, the researchers have made a device that is one thirtieth as thick and better at conforming to the natural bumpiness of skin. ”What we’ve found is that you don’t even need the elastomer backing,” John Rogers tells Technology Review. “You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.”

Once on the skin, the researchers use a commercially available spray-on bandage to protect the electronics in a “very robust way.” Because of the skin’s natural exfoliation process, though, the device flakes off after two weeks — an inherent flaw of any surface-mounted skin-based electronics (epidermal electronics). To achieve a longer lifespan we will need to embed devices under the skin, like real tattoos.

As for how the Rogers group created a computer that’s flexible enough to move and stretch with your body, we look no further thanthe stretchable battery that the same researchers unveiled in February. In essence, the stretchable battery and electronic tattoos are standard computer circuits, fashioned from normal silicon processes — but each of the components are connected by special, serpentine wires that are capable of flexing and stretching gracefully (pictured right). In the case of the battery, which has a liquid electrolyte, the components are encased in stretchy silicone — but with this new electronic tattoo, your skin is the stretchy substrate.

Moving forward, the researchers say they will work on improving their flexible wireless charging circuitry (which debuted in the stretchable battery) and communications circuitry — after all, what good is an electronic tattoo that can’t connect to other sensors, or some kind of wearable computer/smartphone?

Eventually, the goal is to produce sensors and simple computers that might aid with healthcare (m-health), or more generally with quantified health/body hacking (using technology to track your body’s state and performance throughout the day). You can easily imagine an electronic tattoo that keeps track of a surgical wound and alerts doctors if it doesn’t heal as expected. On the elective front, you might install an electronic tattoo that tells you when your heart or brain activity is spiking, or interacts in interesting ways with other wearable sensors and computers that you might be wearing.

Your next smartphone might use sapphire glass instead of Gorilla Glass

Sapphire, the hardest natural substance after diamond, might soon be used to make smartphone screens. Sheets of sapphire glass are already used by the military to create transparent armor, but if a bunch of sapphire-synthesizing startups have their way, sapphire glass will soon be cheap enough for use in a wide range of consumer products, such as smartphones, tablets, and other ruggedized devices.

Sapphire is a transparent, crystalline form of aluminium oxide (alumina) that is extraordinarily hard, scratch-resistant, a melting point of 2,030C, and almost completely impermeable and impervious to caustic chemicals. In short, sapphire is a slightly weaker but far cheaper and more abundant version of diamond. In terms of real-world use, sapphire is about 10 times more scratch resistant than normal window glass, and much stronger than any other materials used in optics applications. It is this ruggedness that has led sapphire glass to be used in applications where normal glass just doesn’t cut it, such as bullet-proof glass, watches, and the front window on barcode scanners.

Pieces of GT Advanced Technologies sapphire glass. The one on the left is designed for an iPhone 5.

Most importantly, though, synthetic sapphire is relatively easy to make, though the exact processes used are usually proprietary. In general, it simply involves the melting of large amounts of aluminium oxide in a special furnace, and then letting it slowly cool to create a single crystal of flawless sapphire. Straight-up aluminium oxide creates a transparent crystal of sapphire, but if you want to create a specific gemstone, trace minerals are added — titanium and iron create the stereotypical blue sapphire, while chromium turns it into a ruby. Then, when you have a big crystal (pictured above), a diamond saw is used to slice it into sheets of glass.

At around three times the strength and scratch resistance of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, sapphire glass would make an almost perfect smartphone screen. There’s one caveat: according to a market analyst, a sheet of Gorilla Glass costs around $3, while the same piece of sapphire glass would cost $30. Thanks to increasing competition, though, the cost of sapphire glass is dropping. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a high-end smartphone (such as the iPhone) use a sapphire screen in the next few years. It’s worth noting that the iPhone 5 already uses sapphire glass to protect the rear camera lens, so Apple is certainly aware of sapphire’s potential.

Another option is to create very thin sheets of sapphire, which are then laminated onto a cheaper material. According to Technology Review, GT Advanced Technologies is going down this route. By acquiring Twin Creeks’ ion cannon technology, which creates very thin sheets of silicon from a large crystal of silicon for use in solar cells, GT hopes to produce sheets of sapphire that are thinner than a human hair. In the video above, you can see an iPhone that’s been retrofitted with a sheet of GT’s sapphire glass — its performance really is quite impressive.

Other companies in the US, Russia, and South Korea are also working on reducing the cost of sapphire glass, all with their own proprietary methods. Reaching viability won’t be easy, though: Corning isn’t going to simply sit still. Either way, with our growing reliance on mobile devices, it’s comforting to know that there are developments in the pipeline that will soon make cracked screens a thing of the past.

Researchers create fiber network that operates at 99.7% speed of light, smashes speed and latency records

Researchers at the University of Southampton in England have produced optical fibers that can transfer data at 99.7% of the universe’s speed limit: The speed of light. The researchers have used these new optical fibers to transfer data at 73.7 terabits per second — roughly 10 terabytes per second, and some 1,000 times faster than today’s state-of-the-art 40-gigabit fiber optic links, and at much lower latency.

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second. In any other medium, though, it’s generally a lot slower. In normal optical fibers (silica glass), light travels a full 31% slower. Light actually travels faster through air than glass — which leads us neatly onto the creation of Francesco Poletti and the other members of his University of Southampton team: A hollow optical fiber that is mostly made of air. 

It might seem counterintuitive, transmitting light down fibers made primarily of air, but look around you: If light didn’t travel well through air, then you’d a hard time seeing. It isn’t like researchers haven’t tried making hollow optical fibers before, of course, but you run into trouble when trying to bend around corners. In normal optical fiber, the glass or plastic material has a refractive index, which causes light to bounce around inside the fiber, allowing it to travel long distances, or Remove the glass/plastic and the light just hits the outer casing, causing the signal to fizzle almost immediately. The glass-air interface inside each fiber also causes issues, causing interference and limiting the total optical bandwidth of the link.

The researchers overcame these issues by fundamentally improving the hollow core design, using an ultra-thin photonic-bandgap rim. This new design enables low loss (3.5 dB/km), wide bandwidth (160nm), and latency that blows the doors off normal optic fiber — light, and thus the data, really is travelling 31% faster down this new hollow fiber. To achieve the transmission rate of 73.7 terabits per second, the researchers used wave division multiplexing (WDM), combined with mode division multiplexing, to transmit three modes of 96 channels of 256Gbps. Mode division multiplexing is a new technology that seems to involve spatial filtering — rotating the signals with a polarizer, so that more of fiber can be used. As far as we’re aware, this is one of the fastest ever transmission rates in the lab. 

As for real-world applications, loss of 3.5 dB/km is okay, but it won’t be replacing normal glass fiber any time soon. For short stretches, though, such as in data centers and supercomputer interconnects, these speed-of-light fibers could provide a very significant speed and latency boost.