Tactile Displays Driven by Projected Light

Tactile displays that lend tangible form to digital content could profoundly transform how we interact with computers, much like visual displays have driven successive revolutions in computing over the past 60 years. However, creating tactile displays with the actuation speeds, dynamic ranges, and resolutions that are required for perceptual fidelity has proved challenging. Here, we present a tactile display that directly converts projected light into visible tactile patterns using an energetically passive, photomechanical surface populated with arrays of millimeter-scale optotactile pixels. The pixels transduce incident light into mechanical displacements through rapid, light-stimulated thermal gas expansion, yielding displacements of up to 1 millimeter and response times of 2 to 100 milliseconds. Our use of projected light for power transmission and addressing enables these displays to be scaled in size and resolution at sustainable cost and complexity. We demonstrate devices with up to 1,511 independently addressable pixels. Perceptual studies confirm the capacity of the display to accurately reproduce tactile patterns in location, timing, frequency, and structure. This research establishes a foundation for practical, versatile high-resolution tactile displays driven by light.