One of the main attractions driving the current crop of wearable devices is their ability to deliver notifications in new, more elegant ways. Recent haptic advances like the “Taptic” and “Force Touch” features get us ever-closer to fulfilling the promise of “silent” notifications, normally accomplished by vibrating motors that, while subtle, are still distinctly audible to others. But notifications, no matter how subtle or invisible to others, are still interruptions to us.
At the Lab, we’re looking at technologies and interaction strategies that afford a different behavior - rather than having notifications “pushed” at you in various forms, interrupting you and taking you out of the moment, we’re interested in improving the experience you have when you consciously decide to “check the stack” of unread messages, unhandled notifications, etc. The big difference between this gesture and, say, a taptic tug on your wrist is the synchronicity - the tug happens when it happens, but you are in charge of when you check your stack.
And you already do this sort of checking, right? You pull out your phone, unlock the screen, and swipe down to see what is waiting in your notification tray. What if there was a non-visual way to do this? What if you didn’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket?
As a way of prototyping how this gesture might feel, I looked around for non-visual technologies that might be embeddable in a smartphone (and implementable with our Lab’s capabilities – for example, no nano-machining!). One phenomenon that stood out in terms of novelty, efficacy, and near-term availability is electrovibration – that is, the use of signal conditioning to dynamically change the apparent texture of a smooth surface. This means that we could have a simple, flat surface like the back of a phone and dynamically change how it feels when you run your finger over it – scratchy for a voice mail, ridged like corduroy for a bunch of text messages, or rubbery for “interesting stuff is nearby you.” With a little more sophisticated signal control, you could even impart a sense of “heft” or magnitude to these textures - a subtle grooving for low-level emails, or large, comb-tooth ridges for a pile of urgent updates.