What’s that, you are not into changing the channel with that boring old remote, or despite your voice ? Murata’s ground-up Tactile Controller brings a true twist to each couch potato’s favorite gadget. Quite literally. The company’s prototype remote uses touch-pressure pads and pyroelectricity to investigate the placement of a piezoelectric film. In English: a plastic film produces tiny amounts of electricity at various voltages (output as data) when it’s forced right into a kind of positions, letting you exchange the channel by way of twisting the controller in either direction, or flexing to regulate volume. The model we saw was a plastic sandwich of varieties, and likewise included four solar cells, able to producing one milliwatt of electricity — simply enough to power the device.
We put the controller through its paces on the company’s CEATEC booth, adjusting a TV’s volume and channel up and down, and, well, up and down, since that’s almost all you are able to do with the object. The model we saw only supported five twist positions and 4 bending positions in each direction, so it can theoretically adjust those two basic settings more quickly in line with how much pressure you set at the film, but realistically can’t do much beyond that. The Tactile Controller on display this is more of an explanation of concept of types — with the idea being the plastic film technology itself, and never the battery-free handheld remote control, which the corporate decided will be the most visual application for testing its new film, though not necessarily probably the most practical. Understandably, Murata doesn’t have any plans to release the remote that we saw today, but you could jump past this to look us do the twist.
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