Tactus: Dynamic Physical Buttons on Touchscreens 8 Jun 2012

This is amazing: Tactus has developed "the world's first dynamic deformable tactile surface"...or put another way, it has developed a special kind of touchscreen display that enables real, physical buttons to rise up from its surface on demand, and then recede back into the screen, leaving a perfectly flat, transparent surface, when no longer required.

This technolgoy could make smart devices like the iPad and iPhone a lot more accessible to visually impaired users. (These folks often struggle with standard touchscreens, as the lack of tactile feedback makes it difficult or impossible for them to tell what they are pressing on screen.)

[via OhGizmo!]