Development of Dynamically Re-formable Input Device in Tactile and Visual Interaction

This paper describes a flexible tactile input device to operate vehicular telematics systems such as car navigation systems in quick, easy and convenient manner. The two key features of the device are: It provides visual guidance and tactual keys which can be felt. While users may press a button shown on a flat monitor under the touch screen in a conventional touch monitor, using our input device, they press a button that is tactually felt as well as visually shown. Next the tactual keys are reconfigured, being synchronized to the screen image. In a conventional touch screen configuration, surface profiles are usually fixed ones. The surface profiles of our input device are real-time reconfigured according to the screen menu. To confirm the effectiveness of the dynamically re-formable input device, experiments to compare a touch screen with our device reaction time were performed.