Why Apple's Taptic engine in the iPhone 6S is more important than 3D touch
forbes.com
forbes.com
(Can I just say that I really hate people who dislike that metaphor? A quantum leap is a discontinuous and surprising change, not necessarily a massive one. It's more appropriate to describe a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one. As such it doesn't really matter that in reality a quantum leap is a tiny distance, what matters is that it's discontinuous, with no steps in between. That's what the metaphor is playing at. Something that seems familiar weirdly ends up in a suprising place it has no right to be. Not without being somewhere else in between first.)
On the MacBooks that same technology most certainly is a quantum leap: on the trackpads it actually feels like clicking down a physical button. On the phones that same sensation is not created. Not at all, not even a little tiny bit.
My hypothesis is that with the trackpad your only point of contact with a vibrating surface is the tip of your finger. With the phones you feel the whole device vibrating in your hand. That should make it harder to fool your brain into thinking you are holding anything but a vibrating device. I will have to lay the new iPhones flat on a table and test it out when I get the opportunity, maybe they would feel differently. (But even if they could create that feeling while flat on the table iPhones are probably set up differently than MacBook trackpads and more tuned to just create a pleasant vibration, since that's all they normally can do in your hand.)
All that said, yeah, real tactile feedback, if it can be pulled of convincingly, provides some neat perspectives for touch interfaces.
Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLS2WXZQxU.
I think you won't find animals that use rolling as their primary method. Problems is that for feet, you need a patch of relatively flat surface every footstep. For wheels, you need a continuous stretch, or you need a design that can withstand impacts. Small animals have an advantage there, as gravity isn't as harsh on them as on larger animals.
And of course, there's Pedalternorotandomovens Centroculatus Articulosus (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl-up)
There is also nothing wrong with iterative improvement. I quite like it actually, and I think people who dismiss it out of hand are weird.
I haven't seen the new phone in real life but as far as I can see from the press IOS9 has introduced a context menu exclusively for 6S - but could that now have been done using the existing hardware and thus for all models? Ie. by triggering the context menu with double tap, long tap, tap and slide up or something?
It is a classical critism of context menus that they are hidden and their presence needs to be learned. This problem obviously gets worse here as the context menu is only present in the latest hardware.
From a business perspective it makes sense: You are selling a package and the extra software feature is given to those pay for the update. But whether it is good design - that is another question.
And as a curiosity: Context menus are used much less in Mac OS than Windows. There is only a single button on an Apple laptop and Apple went on for decades with the one-button mouse for their desktop computers, only to introduce a multi-button mouse very late.
But bringing pressure sensitivity back to touch screens could allow things like on-screen keyboards on tablets that allow fingers to rest on the screen without constantly registering input. Meaning that a OSK moves one step closer to a physical keyboard.
Edit:
And i just reminded myself that supposedly there is a company working on how to use static electricity to give variable surface texture. So you could perhaps recognize the location of keys by your fingers brushing over rough patches.
And other than iPhone he his articles are about biology in various forms, even when supposedly bringing up Pixars (memory).