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Some University of Glasgow PhD students, in the Computing Science Department, have posted a prototype applet that is the first to bring some level of haptic or sensory feedback to the iPhone's keyboard. The idea is to enable iPhone users to actually feel something when tapping the keyboard and distinguish one key from another through touch.

Although the iPhone's touch screen keyboard is well-designed and easy to use, you wouldn't want to hammer out an e-mail, for example, without looking directly at it the whole time. Because, unlike with a hardware-based typer—such as those on the BlackBerry, Treo, Q, BlackJack, etc.—the iPhone's QWERTY doesn't offer anything in the way of tactile feedback.

It is this feedback that helps to make users of smartphones with physical keyboards more accurate and faster typists than those of devices with touch-screen typers. It is also what keeps a lot of heavy e-mail types from taking up the iPhone as an alternative to their BlackBerry or Windows Mobile.

The Glasgow student's haptic home page sums up the problem with touch keyboards this way:

The majority of interaction on a mobile device is visual thus placing a huge demand on the users visual attention which can be dangerous in certain mobile situations or socially inappropriate in meetings for example. Furthermore, when interacting with a button - for example, with the fingertip - the image of the button is covered by the fingertip and therefore any visual feedback can go unnoticed.

(Apple gets around the latter problem with the iPhone keyboard by popping up a larger image of a key when a user covers that with a finger.)

To bring touch feedback to the iPhone, the Glasgow students took advantage of the iPhone's vibrotactile actuator, which, among other things, makes the iPhone vibrate in silent mode. Because the actuator is capable of vibrating at 12 different speeds, they were able to integrate a wide range of tactile sensations into their haptic keyboard program

The folks over at tuaw have given prototype haptic application a try. And while they offer up kudos for the effort, they emphasize that there are a number of issues keeping the software firmly in the proof of concept arena.

The program is very unstable, causing it to crash often and sometimes keep the iPhone vibrating even after lifting your finger up off a key. You must test the haptic system in a text editor rather than with an application like Safari. And the battery life of the iPhone takes a heavy hit, which is an unfortunate byproduct of a system that causes the vibrotactile actuator to vibrate often.

Otherwise than these caveats, the software apparently - for the most part - performed as advertised. It successfully simulated the up and down events of pushing a key on the iPhone keyboard and enabled tuaw to distinguish the edges of keys.

[via tuaw]