Patent Application
20170192457
The present invention is related to a user interface device provided with surface haptic sensations, and particularly to a touch panel for generating tactile feedback.
“Intelligent” portable electronic devices, such as smart phones, tablet computers, and the like, are becoming increasingly powerful computational tools. Moreover, these devices are becoming more prevalent in today's society. For example, not too long ago a mobile phone was a simplistic device with a twelve-key keypad that only made telephone calls. Today, “smart” phones, tablet computers, personal digital assistants, and other portable electronic devices not only make telephone calls, but also manage address books, maintain calendars, play music and videos, display pictures, and surf the web.
Some display screens can also be used as a touch based input component. These touchscreens are capable of displaying various text and graphics to a user, which the user can select by touching the touchscreen. More specifically, touchscreens can be configured to display virtual buttons and other types of options to the user. While the emergence of mainstream touch display computing has presented usability benefits for many computer users, people with visual impairments often experience significant challenges when interacting with touch display user interfaces. A major feature of touch display is their ability to enable to directly manipulate information with their fingertips, but this capability often presents challenges to blind users, who cannot see or feel the visual information presented.
Fortunately, many mainstream touch display devices now provide tactile feedback for blind and visually impaired users. U.S. Pat. No. 7,148,875 discloses a haptic feedback device for touchpads and other touch controls wherein haptic feedback is provided by direct application of a force or motion to a touch display in a manner that the user's finger can feel the force or motion. To this end, one or more actuators are coupled to the touchpad to apply a force directly to touch display surface. In one embodiment, the actuator comprises a piezoelectric actuator, a voice coil, a pager motor, or a solenoid coupled to the touchpad. Currently, touch panels can be tracked and used on most imaging-based touch display systems. While some touch panels include a tactile overlay may be made of transparent materials, such as clear acrylic plastic, so that touch panels are quite slippery on the touch surface. Damaged by long use, the touch surface of the touch panel is badly abrasion and almost illegible so as to cause visual impair users loss or damage.
In view of the above-described situation, it is necessary to provide an improved touch panel for solving the problems mentioned above.
Many aspects of the embodiment can be better understood with reference to the following drawings. The components in the drawings are not necessarily drawn to scale, the emphasis instead being placed upon clearly illustrating the principles of the present disclosure. Moreover, in the drawings, like reference numerals designate corresponding parts throughout the several views.
Reference will now be made to describe an exemplary embodiment of the present disclosure in detail.
Referring to FIG.1,
As shown in
Due to properties of the tactile overlay 11 made of glass material, in the present disclosure the tactile overlay 11 with the tactile elements 21 are imprinted or hot-embossed by a TaC (Tetrahedral Amorphous Carbon)-coated tungsten carbide mold. Hot-Embossing is a very versatile replication method which uses high pressure and elevated temperature to transfer the structures from the master into the polymer. So, the tactile elements 21 are grinded permanent and scratch resistant by the TaC-coated tungsten carbide mold.
As shown in
By performing the present method, the tactile overlay 11 with the tactile element 21 can be mass-produced. In addition, most of conventional necessary ultra-precision machining steps are obviated, tactile elements integrated imprinted on the tactile overlay 11 made of glass material by virtue of hot-embossing technology. Thus the manufacturing cost is reduced greatly.
While the present invention has been described with reference to a specific embodiment, the description of the invention is illustrative and is not to be construed as limiting the invention. Various of modifications to the present invention can be made to the exemplary embodiment by those skilled in the art without departing from the true spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims.
