- Don't you hate it when this happens,
you're perfectly happy with what you have,
then, you find something that's so much better
that everything else turns to garbage.
This luxurious trackpad on the XPS 15, garbage.
The pinnacle of touchpad design on this MacBook here,
limp garbage,
and that's no exaggeration.
The folks over at Sensel can honestly call this touchpad
a completely new way to interact with your laptop or phone.
And I am super excited to be the first one
to properly explain it.
Just like I'm going to explain
why you should check out our sponsor, CableMod.
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(upbeat music)
The Thinkpad X1 Titanium
is equipped with the first proper trackpad
using Sensel's force touch technology,
which is a completely new way for touchpads to work
and allows you to do some really cool things,
like operate the touchpad flawlessly
with a big winter glove on.
But, before we can really appreciate
how revolutionary this tech is,
we need a short history lesson.
Resistive touchpads were most popular in early laptops
and they operate by having two conductive layers
separated by some insulating pads.
When your finger touches the touchpad,
it deforms and completes the circuit
between the top and bottom layers.
The resistance in the circuit
is then measured by four sensors on the edge of the trackpad
to figure out where your finger is.
And while this method is pretty good
if your hand is in a glove,
that's about all it's good for.
Resistive trackpads make the screen look cloudy,
they suffer from poor accuracy
and, they generally only have support
for a single touch point.
So, perfect for a bus ticket dispenser
and not much else today.
Now most modern touchpads of touchscreens,
are capacitive,
and they work on the principle
that your body is a bit electrically conductive.
So basically, below the surface of it then
is a grid of electrodes that are positively
and negatively charged.
And as your finger comes into contact with the surface,
the charge distribution between these electrodes changes.
This is picked up by a circuit in your phone
or your touchpad and turned into the position
of your finger.
For more detail on this,
check out this video by the Physics Girl.
She does a great job of explaining the whole chain
to go from finger to poop emoji.
What's different about Sensel's touchpad
is that instead of using the electricity in your finger,
it looks at the force you're applying,
and this is achieved using what's called
a force sensing resistor or FSR.
FSRs work by having a conductive layer,
normally printed silver
with a whole bunch of tightly patched traces.
And then above this, is a polymer
that consists of a bunch of super small
electrically conductive particles
suspended in a non-conductive material.
So then as force is applied to the polymer, compressing it,
the electrically conductive particles get closer together
and create a bunch of different electrical pathways
which is essentially a bunch of little short circuits
across the silver conductor.
This changes the resistance
measured across the conductive film
which can be turned into a measured amount of force.
Where it gets really complicated,
sorry,
this wasn't complicated yet? - [Alex] Not at all!
- Where it gets really complicated
is that none of those tiny conductive particles
ever actually touch each other.
So then, how do they short?
I'm so glad you asked.
As a force is applied to the FSR,
the chances of quantum tunneling
between these particles increases,
which increases the chances of electrons
hippity-hopping between the conductive particles
decreasing the resistance of the FSR.
- So, quick note about that,
we talked to the guys over at Sensel after the shoot
and they said that experts in the field
don't agree on the exact mechanism of how FSRs work.
Only committing to say, "I prefer to think of it
simply as conductivity changing
as contact area between the FSR layer
and the electrodes changes on a microscopic scale."
So, don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia kids,
they're paid off by big quantum.
- Now those of you in the science and maker crowds
will probably know that FSRs are nothing new,
but to be used in a touchpad,
they need to be much smaller
and way more accurate than traditional FSRs.
And Sensel was able to achieve this
by making each FSR just one millimeter.
So that means there are a lot of freaking four sensors
in even a small trackpad like this one,
nearly 6,000 by our rough count.
What this translates to in the real world then
is exceptional tracking accuracy.
I mean, think about it this way,
what gives you a more detailed picture?
Lots of megapixels, or just a few megapixels?
Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that.
But, the basic idea applies,
because on traditional capacitive touchpads,
each electrode is a whopping four millimeters apart,
and, as you're moving, sliding your finger around
from one electrode to the next,
the electrical signal that's outputted
is super non-linear,
greatly reducing the trackpad's accuracy.
So to combat this,
a whole bunch of complicated tuning
has to be applied to the trackpad
to make your fingers movements accurate.
That's why Apple's trackpads
because they spend so much time on this step.
But with Sensel's FSRs,
the raw output from the trackpad is already really good.
Now, you might be thinking, oh yeah Apple,
don't they already have this whole pushing down
on trackpads thing figured out?
Well, no.
3D touch, rip,
used capacitive sensors that detected the distance
between the front glass and the backlight in your phone.
And as for force touch,
well there, Apple's just using
a regular capacitive touchpad,
then, they're simulating the feel of a click
using two solenoids placed below its surface.
So you press down and they vibrate a bit
to give you some delightful haptic feedback.
And, this is cool,
Sensel has an ingenious answer to that as well.
What they realized was that they're already printing a PCB.
So on a layer below all the FSRs,
they could just print a big old coil,
and with the help of some magnets below the touchpad,
the whole thing turns into a speaker.
For more information on how exactly that works,
you can check out our video on "Voice Coils."
But there are two main advantages of doing haptics this way,
first, it's much cheaper than adding solenoids
after the fact,
and second, the whole thing is super small.
The Z height of Sensel's trackpad is only three millimeters.
So by using both the force data and the voice coil,
the level of tuning that's possible
on a touchpad like this, is staggering.
We're killing two birds with one stone here,
getting in a webcam test for the Thinkpad X1 Titanium.
I'm in the Sensel's configurator,
and there's a whole bunch of stuff that we can change here.
So why don't we try the crisp click pre-set.
Oh!
It almost feels like a mouse switch.
It has a sound to it, which I guess makes sense,
it has a speaker.
That's crazy!
It actually feels like it's moving further down,
'cause it's like a click, click,
instead of like a tick!
Okay, you can even hear the difference in the sound.
Hold on, I'll try and get this up to the microphone here.
Okay.
Check this out, David, can you hear this?
Here's deep click.
It feels that different.
And then, if you wanna get really crazy,
get really crazy time,
you can actually tune it yourself.
I wanna change it to 500 grams of force.
Oh yeah, 500 gram deep click.
Oh man!
That's, no, that is not necessary.
Okay.
Go down 28 grams of force.
Oh!
It almost feels like getting like zap
with electric (indistinct) or whatever.
Like you just touch it and it's like, Oh, hey,
hi, how are you doing?
That's the kind of technology advancement
that just puts a smile on your face.
But, there is one problem with using a purely FSR trackpad,
it can be a little on the expensive side.
So you will see some PCs adopt this tech
like the Thinkpad X1 Titanium.
But Sensel knows that most of these
are gonna end up in industrial and medical devices
where accurate tracking through gloves is a requirement.
The good news though, is that this trackpad here
actually uses a combination of FSR
and traditional capacitive touch,
and it still great.
Now I wasn't able to get exact details on how it works
because the patent is still going through,
but Sensel was able to say that they applied
the same principles that allowed them to shrink down
their FSRs to their capacitive touchpad electrodes,
and they got them down to one millimeter as well
to improve accuracy.
Then, they added some FSR goodness around the outsides.
So what we've got here is a two-layer PCB
where the top one is a conventional capacitive touchpad,
and then the second one is a ring of FSRs
with a voice coil in the center.
This kind of integration is only possible
when a single supplier is creating every part of the stack.
Since as you can probably imagine,
turning on a voice coil isn't great for the accuracy
of capacitive touch if you're not able to compensate for it.
Which brings us to the big question then:
Should you buy the Thinkpad X1 Titanium today?
Well, it's complicated.
The tracking, pooh!
Absolutely exceptional!
See you later synaptics,
is that what they're called? - [Alex] Yeah.
- But, sometimes in life, size does matter,
and this is one of those situations.
So you get all the benefits of an FSR-based touchpad,
it works great with a glove
or even if it's a bit wet,
but Lenovo possibly due to the prohibitive cost
only gave us three and a half inches.
It also uses a third party haptic solution
so the click detail isn't the same
as on our standalone engineering sample trackpad here.
But we're still super bullish on this technology.
Sensel said they're already working with a bunch of OEMs
to bring their trackpads into more laptops,
and it is not an overstatement to say
that this will change how we interact with our computers.
For instance, with this technology,
it would be possible to make a touchpad
that goes all the way across the bottom of a laptop.
So palm rejection is way easier using force data,
or, you could make laptops,
to integrate some of the cool stuff
that we checked out in our recent "Sensel Morph" video,
like modular slap on magnetic interfaces
or unlimited macro buttons.
The added functionality of the voice coil
could also add another dimension,
like, you could have different fields for different buttons
or, if you're turning them on or off,
or, a different click if you have an invalid entry
on a form,
or, you could have it do a celebratory buzz
if you buy something on lttstore.com,
like this great looking stealth hoodie.
So bottom line, laptop makers,
if you haven't done it yet,
get in touch with these guys.
Get it?
Because every other trackpad feels terrible
now that I've used it.
Just like every other sponsor Segway feels terrible
once you've had mine.
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If you guys enjoyed this video
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