Here is a paradox of our times. In recent years, computers have become ridiculously portable. Tablets, laptops, and even some gaming PCs are incredibly sleek and light, making it easier than ever to do whatever from wherever.
But now that touchscreens are the norm and ports are being pruned away, you often have to throw a cluttered mess of mice, Bluetooth keyboards, adapter dongles, and maybe even some card readers into your bag if you really want to hunker down and work. When you plug all that in, congratulations: Your light and elegant device is now a Rube Goldberg machine.
With an iPad-sized device that connects to anything with Bluetooth or a USB port, a startup called Sensel thinks it might be able to combine most of those accessories into a simple modular slate.
Sensel's little desktop device looks like a trackpad. And sure, you can use it as a trackpad. You can also draw on it with a paintbrush, or you can snap on an overlay and use it as a Bluetooth keyboard. It can sense force, so it registers the urgency of your finger, your pen, or your keypress. This versatility—the device's ability to accept multiple kinds of input and to decode complex gestures—speaks to the company's broader goal: to crack the next phase of human-computer interaction.
When you first see it sitting on the table, the Sensel Morph resembles Wacom's Intuos line of pen-and-tablet tools. Makes sense; it's flat and looks ready for touch input. But in terms of the touch technology it uses and its capabilities, it's a different beast. A modular design allows the Morph to be used in both in its naked state and with a series of snap-on overlays. Those overlays each have a unique pattern of magnetic connectors that allow the hardware to recognize which one is attached.
If you want to use it as a keyboard, you can do that with a simple magnetic overlay. If you want to use it as a painting surface with built-in hotkeys, there's an overlay for that, too. You can use an overlay to turn it into a drum machine, a piano, or a MIDI controller. It's even free-form customizable beyond that, thanks to APIs that let you program and create overlays for your own ideas.
The key to the Morph's modular ways are in the unique force sensors that cover its surface. The touchpads and touchscreens in nearly every device these days use capacitive sensors. They're driven by electrical charges transmitted from your finger—or a special stylus that mimics the capacitance of a human finger—to register taps and swipes. You can't just tap any old object on your phone's touchscreen and have it register input. Go ahead, try it with a pen cap or a baby carrot. No dice.
The Sensel Morph is different. It's more like a giant resistive sensor—those squishy, finicky screens on things like the Palm Treo—except it's as slick and reactive as a capacitive screen. But it's also more sensitive and more versatile than a capacitive surface.
Using 20,000 pressure sensors embedded in its 9-by-5-inch touch zone, the Morph can sense the location and force of up to 16 different points of pressure on its surface. You don't have to use special styli or your fingers, either. The precise pad can sense the difference between types of paint brushes, the difference between a finger and a drumstick, or a soft press and a hard hammer on a piano keyboard. It's also big enough to use with two hands.
"I think talking about the technology as a touch technology sort of sells it short," says Aaron Zarraga, Sensel's CTO and co-founder. "It's really a contact technology for any type of physical thing you want to put into the digital world."
Zarraga and Sensel's other co-founder and CEO Ilya Rosenberg say that in the process of building prototypes, they noticed that the sensors could pick up pressure even when they were covered by little pieces of a cut-up mousepad. That evolved into an impressive QWERTY keyboard overlay, one where the keys travel and provide feedback due to spongy underpinnings.
"It's a super interesting experience because it's kind of squishy," Zarraga says. "You get this feedback when you're pressing into the sensor. It feels so analog. We started thinking of this as a tactile interface, and we can really start building 3-D tactile experiences."
Zarraga and Rosenberg first worked together at Amazon's Lab126, where they were both on the team that helped develop the force sensors used in the Kindle Voyage. Before Lab126, Rosenberg owned his own company, Touchco, that developed force-touch technology for other devices. While Rosenberg says that the tech he developed at Touchco was "in some ways, the perfect touch sensor," it was too expensive and too hard to manufacture in bulk. After leaving Lab126 in 2013, he turned his attention back to making a cheaper and more-efficient force-sensitive technology. And he wanted to turn it into a product, not just a component.
The first goal was cutting costs. Rosenberg says that he and Zarraga figured out a way to produce high-density force sensors using standard processes, which would make mass-manufacturing the device much cheaper. They also devised a way to drive those sensors electrically using cheap, off-the-shelf parts and developed a material with a "high dynamic range for sensing," according to Rosenberg.
"When we first built it, we weren't sure which direction we wanted it to go in," Rosenberg says. "We had a couple of different ideas, but we knew that we wanted to build a product. With Touchco and also being at Amazon, we'd just seen a lot of pure technology companies and seen how difficult it was to trim the fat and become a sustainable business. You're so dependent on getting that first deal and getting that high volume. And it's really competitive just trying to ship a touch sensor. So we knew we wanted to build a product."
To develop that product, they enlisted the help of the venerable hardware firm Frog Design. For this project, Frog's input went far beyond industrial design, although the firm's influence is apparent in the Sensel Morph's slick aluminum build, flickering LEDs, and snap-in magnetic overlays. Frog is actually an investor in Sensel through frogVentures, a newer wing of the business that helps fund and advise early-stage companies.
"We're really looking for companies that are moving us toward a future that Frog is also trying to move toward," says Ethan Imboden, VP and Head of Venture Design at Frog. "One of our objectives is to enhance the human experience through design, which is a broad statement. But part of that is really looking at human-computer interaction and how there's a huge discrepancy between us in the tangible world and the way we actually communicate with our devices. This was something that Ilya and Aaron were passionate about, and we really saw eye-to-eye."
Here is another paradox of our times: The Sensel Morph has so many potential use cases, it's hard to market. A new input device that can be used for anything from games to art to music production to a Bluetooth keyboard could be a difficult sell.
"We realized there were so many potential uses for the device, and as we started to realize this, we got concerned about making a compelling device that does so many things," Rosenberg says. "How do we explain it to consumers? We've been told the first rule of marketing a product is that you narrow down the audience, you make a device that's very specific. What we kept running into is that this device didn't want to be very specific."
In order to figure out the best way to sell such a flexible input scheme, Sensel and frogVentures are hoping Kickstarter will help them out. The Sensel Morph campaign, which launched today, is hoping to raise $60,000 to fund production of the device over the next two months; for a $250 pledge, backers will get a Morph and three overlays of their choice.
But according to Frog's Imboden, the bigger goal is to pinpoint the most desired use-cases for the device by keeping track of the most popular overlays.
"One of the big challenges, and also the big opportunity, is that this product is a blank canvas," Imboden says. "It's really sort of an ideal use of a crowdfunding platform, where financially it'll be helpful, but moreover, the ability to put these initial tools in the hands of creators and have them run with it. We've only been able to imagine to a certain degree what's possible with this."
