They might have seemed like a novelty at first, but tablets have shown their usefulness in just about every industry and in countless applications. But something has always been missing from the touchscreen tablet experience: haptic feedback that lets you feel more physically connected with the tool you’re using. The Modulares Interface gives you that physical sense of control.

Interaction Designer Florian Born‘s project gives users a tangible physical connection to their iPads through a series of knobs, sliders, and buttons. The Modulares Interface consists of three parts: a frame to hold the iPad, a set of modular controllers, and the app that conveys your movements to the corresponding software as commands. The controllers contain magnets to snap securely to the frame, and they’re conductive so they send electrical signals to the touchscreen just like human fingers would.

When your iPad is in the frame, you can arrange the controller modules in any way you like. When it’s all set up, it looks like a genuine old-fashioned sound board. While it looks ideal for music composing, mixing, and arranging, the project would theoretically be compatible with all kinds of tablet functions. Don’t look for the Modulares Interface on store shelves anytime soon, however – it’s a student project and the creator doesn’t have any intent to produce it commercially.

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Most of our devices utilize touch technology in some way: the track pads on our laptops, the screens on all-in-one desktops, and just about everything on our smartphones. Even when the gestures are deemed “intuitive” by the manufacturers, in reality they are unnatural movements we get used to by using these devices.

Chris Harrison of CMU’s Future Interfaces Group is working on a set of virtual tools called Touchtools that mimic the physical tools we use in the real world, making our interactions with technology simpler and more life-like. The suite of tools includes a marker, a large eraser, a small eraser, a camera, a tape measure, a magnifying glass, and even a computer mouse.

By using gestures that correspond to the way we would handle these objects in real life, the novel interfaces make remembering and using the actions simple and truly intuitive. Users hold their hands in the position they would if using that tool in real life, pressing a hand into the screen to activate and use the tool.

Rather than the cumbersome toolbars that some programs utilize, the Touchtools allow for fluid interactions with the device. There’s no learning new commands or remembering how many fingers to zoom or double-click; just the natural motions of using real-world tools converted to a digital setting.

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The typical amount of time a person spends in the bathtub in a day isn’t much, but it’s enough to make us miss our phones and laptops for a while. Thankfully, we have to suffer no more: the Aquatop is a system that involves a Kinect camera and a projector mounted above the tub; a pair of waterproof speakers and a PC round out the setup to create an immersive touchscreen out of the surface of your bath water. Bath salts have to be added to the tub to make the surface milky enough to project images onto.

Aquatop lets you play video games when you’re in the tub – something that would be ill-advised at best with traditional gaming systems. The waterproof speakers provide haptic feedback as you play, creating effects like water spouts. Your fingers act as the controllers when you touch the surface of the water, hold them above the water or poke them through the surface from under the water.

The PC attached to the system also allows you to use the surface of your bath water as a desktop computer. You can scoop up a piece of media that is projected on the water and drop it onto a media player, which will start the media playing. Projected images can be removed from the “screen” by making waves in the water that wash them away, or by simply reaching three fingers up from beneath the water and “pulling” the images under.

Letting your limbs float to the top of the water allows you to become a part of the display, melding human and technology in a novel way. Though we doubt we’ll ever see a setup like this on the commercial market, it is a brilliant example of what can be done with unconventional interfaces.

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Fujitsu Laboratories‘ new user interface effectively makes any surface into a touchscreen. The system uses relatively simple hardware: an ordinary webcam and a commercial projector. Image processing technology lets you select text from a real-world document and digitize it, effectively using your fingertip as a next-generation scanner.

The system doesn’t respond to regular activities on the table or whatever surface you’re using it on. It would react to the pointing of a fingertip which, according to Fujitsu, is an effective combination of analog operations and digital devices.

Users can also manipulate the system with gestures, which would make it much more useful in a variety of applications. It’s surprisingly adept and able to detect differences in ambient brightness, skin color and fingertip height. It can also adjust for differences in surfaces, such as the curved surface of an open book’s page.

Fujitsu is planning to market the system as an all-around interface which could be used to digitize analog data, make presentations or file paperwork at the courthouse. They are planning to develop a commercial version of the technology for fiscal year 2014, but significant user testing is required before it’s ready for the market.

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