- The next Apple Pencil may feature haptic feedback.
- It could emulate the feel of pencil on paper.
- It’s not just artists; writers and musicians might also like the haptics.
The next Apple Pencil, rumored to be announced next week, will buzz and buck as you scrape it over virtual paper, thanks to the inclusion of haptic feedback.
According to Bloomberg’s bountiful rumor meister Mark Gurman, Apple is about to launch a new Pencil, one with haptic feedback and new gestures. The Apple Pencil lineup is currently a mess, with three models that may or may not be compatible with the iPad you buy. This new model probably won’t fix that—it’ll probably make the confusion even worse. But haptic feedback is going to allow for some pretty interesting new features, upon which we shall speculate right now. And they’re not all for drawing and painting either.
“As someone who has spent a lifetime mastering both the brush and the stylus, the potential introduction of haptic feedback to simulate paper textures could be a transformative development, not merely an attractive add-on. This feature promises to bridge the tactile gap between traditional and digital art-making, providing a more intuitive and immersive experience that could enhance the creative process,” Jerry Poon, an award-winning painter and published illustrator.
Feedback Loop
When you stroke a pencil over rough watercolor paper, or scrub oil paint into an unprimed canvas with a hogs-hair brush, you feel the surface through the tool. This informs how you interact with the media you’re using, and changes the way you work. Just ask people who buy matte, paper-like screen-protectors for their iPads so it feels more like drawing on paper than letting a plastic-tipped stick skitter over glass.
Haptics could change that. Apple is already a master of fake touch feedback. Think about the digital crown on the Apple Watch, whose faux clicks feel utterly real, or the subtle haptic bump you get from some dial controls when you return them to their zero settings, like a virtual detent.
With a haptic pencil, these vibrations could help sell the illusion of different paints and pencils on different surfaces. The pencil could bump up against an on-screen ruler, or help you to not color over the lines in an adult coloring book, if anyone still does those.
There’s an undeniable creative flow that comes from the physical sensation of a quality pen seamlessly moving across paper.
It’s not just visual artists that might enjoy this, either.
“Writers may benefit just as much, if not more. There’s an undeniable creative flow that comes from the physical sensation of a quality pen seamlessly moving across paper,” writer, poet, and publisher William Green told Lifewire via email.
Musicians, too, might like the feedback. Any time you use the pencil to turn an on-screen dial in Apple’s Logic, for example, that dial could click like the Apple Watch’s crown. Or you could use the pencil to bow a virtual violin or strum guitar strings.
Main Squeeze
This all sounds neat, but do we really want our virtual pencils to ape the real world? In meatspace, things feel like they do because that’s just how they are. This sounds obvious until you consider that, in order to mimic the feel of real-life interactions, you have to get absolutely everything right.
“Providing artificial haptic feedback for a naturally tactile activity is a monumental task with very little room for error. If not perfectly executed the feature will likely become an annoyance rather than an asset,” Sara Bodde, senior human factors specialist at Priority Designs told Lifewire via email. “The feature could easily fall into a version of uncanny valley. If the haptic response is trying to be ‘realistic’ but cannot meet the quality or consistency needed to match its real-life counterpart, people will notice.”
Also, what if the kind of paper you want isn’t in the app? Like any software that models the real world, you’re limited to what the programmer adds to the app. With paint on paper, tilting the paper might cause the paint to run. It might soak through to the next page and leave marks that inspire your next work. You can clip alligator clips to guitar strings to make them rattle in sympathy with the music. With virtual recreations, the creativity is more in the hands of the programmer than the user.
That said, features like this also add new ways to do things, and users may find ways to push them into new places.
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News Summary:
- How Apple Pencil's Haptic Feedback And New Gestures Could Simulate Paper
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