3D display could soon bring touch to the digital world
A new, shape-shifting display can sense and respond to human touch
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a soft shape display, a robot that can rapidly and precisely change its surface geometry to interact with objects and liquids, react to human touch, and display letters and numbers – all at the same time. The display demonstrates high performance applications and could appear in the future on the factory floor, in medical laboratories, or in your own home.
Imagine an iPad that’s more than just an iPad—with a surface that can morph and deform, allowing you to draw 3D designs, create haiku that jump out from the screen and even hold your partner’s hand from an ocean away.
That’s the vision of a team of engineers from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany. In a new study published in Nature Communications on July 31, they’ve created a one-of-a-kind shape-shifting display that fits on a card table. The device is made from a 10-by-10 grid of soft robotic “muscles” that can sense outside pressure and pop up to create patterns. It’s precise enough to generate scrolling text and fast enough to shake a chemistry beaker filled with fluid.
It may also deliver something even rarer: the sense of touch in a digital age.
“As technology has progressed, we started with sending text over long distances, then audio and later video,” said Brian Johnson, one of two lead authors of the new study who earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering at CU Boulder in 2022 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. “But we’re still missing touch.”
Johnson and his colleagues described their shape display July 31 in the journal Nature Communications.
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