Haptic Touch Screen

It's difficult for me to describe most of the work I did at Volkswagen because of confidentiality, but fortunately this project has been well described in several published patent documents. It is desirable to replace conventional mechanical buttons with a touch screen for greater freedom to reconfigure the HMI, but the touch screen does not offer the same touch feedback as buttons do. In a vehicle environment, where electronics cannot demand the driver's visual attention, this is particularly important. This project provides vibrotactile feedback in order to give the user a similar touch feeling to pressing conventional buttons. This technology even has the capability to communicate some of the textural information necessary to locate a button.