In the peripheral filed, the standard of comfort is actually
depending on the methods that had been discovered and used by many people
before. When a new technology comes to the market, we will compare it with a
keyboard, mouse, touchpad, or a touchscreen. Interestingly, a new breakthrough
from Sensel team may change our paradigm about peripheral realm.
The developer introduces the next incarnation of the
touchpad system. By combining multi-touch interaction and pressure reader
feature, the Sensel Morph is finally created. The talents behind Sensel Morph
try to remove the limitations of hand movements that usually stop users from
giving maximum creations, while opening new potential opportunities in the
fields of art, digital music, and gaming.
Sensel Morph looks like a wide touchpad board, it consist of
a touchpad and module that are connected to the main device. Maybe so far
Sensel Morp still looks ordinary, but the secret lies in its flattened body.
This peripheral can detect dynamic touches such as finger touches, soft
brushes, and also the beats of drum sticks. You only need to connect the Sensel
Morph to a PC or Arduino via cable, or iPad via Bluetooth.
And from there, the freedom of usage and flexibility are
opened. For example, you can add a special overlay over the Sensel Morph, it
can be in the form of a keyboard, a synthesizer panel, piano, painting palette,
a video game controller and others. Remarkably, Sensel Morph is able to
recognize the types of overlay automatically, because there are already
installed 'physical applications'.
In practical use, you can use the Sensel Morph to paint
directly with various types of brushes or create a sketch with pencil. Then
with its touch sensitivity, the Sensel Morph is able to translate inputs into
the tones of musical instruments - including drums - accurately. Users are also
given the opportunity to create their own overlay. Sensel provides open source
API that supports C / C ++, Java, Python, Processing, Unity and C #.
If you are unsatisfied with the size of the board, you can
combine multiple units of Sensel Morph into one. The 20,000 sensor points of
Sensel Morph can read the pressures in detail, allowing data entry process at a
high resolution.
If you are interested, you can order the Sensel Morph
through Kickstarter, with the lowest pledge at this time, US $ 249, this device
is planned to begin shipping in June 2016.