A Touchscreen You Can Pinch, Poke and Stretch

There are touchscreen displays and 3D displays, but now there’s one that combines the two: a flexible screen that users can pinch, poke and stretch.

The screen, designed by Dhairya Dand and Rob Hemsley, both of MIT’s Media Lab, is called Obake, named after a shape-shifting spirit of Japanese myth. It’s comprised of a flexible rubber sheet laid over a set of actuators. The whole thing sits under a camera built from a Kinect projector that beams images onto the sheet. The camera also measures how deep the screen is poked into it or how far its stretched.