LiquiTouch: liquid as a medium for versatile tactile feedback on touch surfaces

On interactive surfaces such as touch screens, tabletops or interactive walls, the addition of active tactile feedback has been shown to greatly improve user performance and subjective evaluation of the interaction. However, common electromechanical solutions to enable tactile stimuli on flat touch displays entail the use of costly, complex and cumbersome actuator technology. This especially holds true for solutions which try to address the full complexity of our sense of touch, i.e. our ability to experience warmth, coolness, pressure, stickiness or smoothness. In this paper, we propose the use of liquid as a medium for versatile tactile feedback. We present LiquiTouch, a first prototype which emits actively generated water jets in order to communicate state, function and material properties of virtual touchscreen elements. We discuss the design implications and illustrate the potentials of using liquid to enrich and improve the interaction with touch surfaces.