Thanks to the researchers at the University of Michigan, it looks like the Force Touch is not going to be an exclusive feature for the latest iPhones.
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Unlike Apple’s Force Touch, which uses polling sensors in the touchscreen, ForcePhone makes use of ultrasound to enable similar functionality. The speaker emits a sound in the 18-24 kHz frequency range, which is well beyond the hearing range of a human, but is good enough for the microphone. So, when the user touches the screen, the character of the emitted sound will change and the software will make note of the changes and act accordingly.
The sound is so low that you don’t need to worry about it disturbing your dog or young folks.
“You don’t need a special screen or built-in sensors to do this,” said Kang Shin, professor in the university’s electrical engineering and computer science department, in a UM press release. “ForcePhone increases the vocabulary between the phone and the user.”
The application can be used for a series of purposes and trained to do things like a series of presses could call a predefined emergency number or a hard press could be programmed to bring you back to your home screen. However, don’t expect the level of detail which you get with Apple’s Force Touch as the whole system is not binary, you could rely on it as a gesture.
According to Shin and Yu-Chih Tung, his grad student, they got the inspiration for this app through the batman movie, “The Dark Knight” where the Batman makes all the phones in the city to act like sonic locator to find the joker.
“I thought it was an interesting idea to turn smartphones into a sonar-based system and felt this could lead to new applications to address challenges faced by smartphone users,” said Tung.
