Thoughts on the Force Touch trackpad

Apple’s newly introduced MacBook includes a Force Touch trackpad which not only detects a click, but can tell how much force you put into that click.

Here’s a link to Apple’s official MacBook page, with their take on Force Touch:

With the new MacBook comes a whole new way to experience a trackpad. The Force Touch trackpad is engineered to deliver a responsive, uniform click no matter where you press the surface. And underneath, force sensors detect how much pressure you’re applying and give you new ways to interact with your Mac. You can now use a Force click to enable new capabilities, like quickly looking up the definition of a word or previewing a file just by clicking and continuing to press on the trackpad.

The demos I’ve seen so far have done a fine job of showing off the basics of Force Touch, but there’s so much more to this technology. How about building a simple analog meter, with a super sensitive needle that tracks the Force you are applying to the Force Touch trackpad?

The ForceGuage would be easy to build and really give a sense of how much force you are applying at any given moment. It would also give a sense of how little latency is involved, how quickly the trackpad responds to changes in Force. As a side benefit, it might make for an excellent chunk of sample code for developers who want to add Force Touch to their own projects.

The Force Touch trackpad also includes haptic feedback:

You’ll also experience haptic feedback — a tactile vibration from the trackpad that adds the sense of touch to what you see on the screen.

The meter could include thresholds (moving from the black to the red in the linked video, for example). The trackpad could offer haptic feedback when you press hard enough to pass from one threshold to the next.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Force Touch can bring. Our existing world is binary: The track pad is clicked or not. The Force Touch trackpad is continuous, with a value based on how hard you press. This is like moving from 2D to 3D, opening up a world of possibility.

It’s not hard to imagine Force Touch coming to a future generation of iOS device. What a unifying moment that would be, bringing all Apple devices together under the Force Touch umbrella.