14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is working on new features for the Surface Pen, and patents that have been discovered recently provide us with an early glimpse into how the company sees the next generations.
After Microsoft patented a way to implement a touch-sensitive retention clip on the Surface Pen, the software giant is now exploring the possibility of bringing haptic feedback on this little device.
A patent simply called “Haptic Stylus” (via Neowin) describes a method to build such a Surface Pen, with a small electromagnet placed inside the stylus close to the tip to generate vibrations, most often when a display is touched.
New Surface Pen this year?
This essentially means that the Surface Pen could gently vibrate whenever it’s being used to draw or write on a PC, and this could help better simulate the feeling of doing the same thing on paper. Microsoft explains in the patent how the whole tech could work:
“A device includes a housing, a tip configured to be movable with respect to the housing, a resilient element fixed to the tip, a substrate fixed to the housing, a coil mounted or patterned on the substrate, and a controller configured to induce haptic feedback via the tip based on applying a signal to the coil, which thereby acts as an electromagnet.
A surface of the substrate faces the resilient element. The resilient element presses against the surface in response to the tip receding toward the housing. The resilient element includes magnetic material. The signal applied on the coil induces a magnetic driving force on the resilient element.”
As usual, a patent is by no means the confirmation that a certain technology is pushed to mass production, but on the other hand, such information does provide us with an early look at how companies intend to improve their products. A new-generation Surface Pen could launch this year as well, as Microsoft is expected to take the wraps off upgraded Surface models in the fall.