14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia McLaren, the Windows Phone device that never came to be, was supposed to launch with several pretty innovative technologies, including the recently unveiled Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interactions.
Microsoft has already presented this technology in the past, but a recent demo at the CHI ’16: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems makes everyone dream of seeing it implemented in a future model, such as the Surface Phone.
This in-depth demo made by Ken Hinckley, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, shows the pre-touch tech running on a Nokia McLaren, but the Microsoft employee hasn’t dropped any hints that it could be installed on any other model in the coming months or years.
And yet, since this isn’t the first time when Microsoft presents it, it’s very clear that the technology is still in the works behind closed doors, and maybe an improved version could be used at some point on a new device.
A rival to Apple’s 3D Touch
Specifically, the pre-touch technology provides new means to interact with the phone in a way that reminds of Apple’s own 3D Touch currently available on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But in Microsoft’s case, this technology offers significantly more advanced options, as it can anticipate your intended action before touching the screen and work accordingly.
In Apple’s case, the 3D Touch tech uses pressure-sensitive display layers to provide different options when pressing harder on the screen.
According to Microsoft, the pre-touch feature uses a combination of multiple sensors that can also provide controls tailor to you depending on “how you are currently holding or using the phone.”
So, for example, if you are holding the phone with one hand and listening to music and then want to touch the screen with a finger from the other hand, if you approach the music tile, the pre-touch system automatically expands the tile to display playback controls for pausing the song or skipping to the next one.
The Surface Phone, which is pretty much the only device that could come with this feature, given the fact that Microsoft is unlikely to release new Lumia models anytime soon, is due in the spring of 2017, so there’s hope that pre-touch tech could actually become available sometime in the future.
