Evaluating transparent liquid screen overlay as a haptic conductor: Method of enhancing touchscreen based user interaction by a transparent deformable liquid screen overlay

In line with our previous work, this research focuses on a method for attenuating acoustic components (noise) while providing enhanced vibrotactile feedback signals on mobile devices using, deformable touchscreen overlays. Traditional mechanism of providing tactile feedback to the fingertip via a flat rigid touchscreen is limited due to the dampening of the mechanoreceptors which are sensitive to static deformation and lie at the tips of the intermediate ridges in the epidermal-dermal junction. This tactile mechanism becomes useless when the fingertip acts against a ridged surface (chemically strengthened alkali-aluminosilicate glass). Furthermore, the actuation provided by most devices is indirect with little or no mediation mechanism, which results in filtering various signal frequencies, loss of signal intensity as well as creating acoustic noise. The resulting haptic signal is considerably inefficient and incongruent to the applied signal, which was designed to stimulate user skin contact. To resolve these issues we developed a unique transparent screen overlay conductor which contains an oil based composition (a low viscosity inert nonconductive liquid), that acts as a soft deformable interaction point, enhancing the ratio between tactile signals and the acoustic components, provided by haptic actuators. Using surface mounted and embedded actuators to the overlay, while being attached to an ExoPC Slate, we measured haptic signal to noise correlation, as well as signal efficiency and strength over multiple frequencies and concluded that the haptic conductor was able to limit auditory noise and mediate tactile signals more efficiently than traditional rigid glass based surfaces.