Touchscreens have become a normal part of everyday life, from the phones in our pockets to the automated checkout line at the grocery store. Touchscreens are now abundant, but one research team is working on removing the physical aspect of the screen altogether. Led by Yasuaki Monnai, a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a touchscreen display, called HaptoMime, that you can’t actually touch.

Rather than a tangible screen, the HaptoMime display projects holographic images into the air with the help of reflective surfaces, creating what appears to be floating images. The images don’t only serve an aesthetic purpose — you can manipulate them with your fingers as you would with a regular touchscreen. The technology that allows the system to recognize touch input is simple enough — an infrared sensor detects the location of the person’s hand, which is then matched with the location of the reflected image. This type of technology has been used before, usually boasting to “turn any surface into a touchscreen,” or at least projecting a specific set of touchscreen controls onto any surface. What makes HaptoMime unique is not that the touch display is holographic, but that you can actually feel what you’re touching.

The physical sensation of touch — i.e. haptic feedback — is achieved through ultrasonic vibrations, and changing the ultrasonic pressure will create different sensations. Stick your finger into the holographic image, and the ultrasonic vibration might mimic the feeling of a traditional glass touchscreen surface, or the smooth plastic of piano keys, as demonstrated in the video below (around the 2:50 mark).

As you can see in the above demo, the device is precise enough to allow a person to use both hands to play a holographic piano — an act that requires precision. The device also projects an image clearly enough for Times New Roman to be legible at only a font size of six.

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Monnai sees the device initially being used for simple key input, like password entry on an ATM. However, a touchscreen that you don’t have to touch means you can manipulate the on-screen images when your hands are wet or greasy, or any other time you normally wouldn’t want to touch a nice, clean display. Even better — especially during the current worldwide Ebola scare — a holographic, non-physical display would mean germs couldn’t stick to the surface, waiting for your finger to swipe over them.

HaptoMime was only shown off earlier this month, so there isn’t a time frame for when the technology could release to the public, but the device works, and that’s the first step toward release.

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