That displacement is large enough for users to locate individual pixels with fingertip precision. Because the same laser beam provides both power and addressing, the panel requires no internal wiring. A scanning system sweeps the beam across the array at high speed, energizing one pixel after another and forming continuous visual and tactile animations.
The team has fabricated arrays with more than 1,500 independently addressable pixels, a significant step up from prior tactile displays that struggled to combine density, speed, and displacement. Response times from two to 100 milliseconds allow the panels to reproduce flowing contours, shapes, and character patterns. In user studies, participants could accurately track moving stimuli, discriminate spatial layouts, and perceive temporal sequences created through sequential pixel activation.
According to the researchers, scalability will follow naturally from the optical addressing scheme. Larger arrays could be driven by the same class of compact scanning lasers used in modern projectors. They also point to potential applications in automotive interfaces that emulate physical controls and electronic texts or diagrams that reshape under a reader’s hand.
Although the work is still a prototype, converting light directly into mechanical deformation at high resolution, the UCSB team has opened a path toward tactile displays that behave much more like visual ones, rendering information as patterns that can be explored by both eye and hand.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/ucsb-researchers-develop-light-powered-haptic-pixels-that-form-tactile-3d-graphics#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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