Handheld touch screen based devices, such as smartphones or tablets, typically provide limited haptic feedback. On current devices, what is visually perceived and what is tactile and kinesthetically felt is semantically uncoupled. In order to improve embodied interaction on handheld screen based devices, new ways to provide richer haptic feedback are required.

TorqueScreen is a prototypical system combining a handheld touch screen device (i.e., a tablet) with an actuated flywheel capable of imposing angular momentum onto the tablet. The TorqueScreen design allows interlinking the movement and physics of virtual objects on the screen with the torque as haptic output imposed on the tablet.

ShearIO is a rich touch interface that provides a way of actively changing the possible shear-based input (i.e., force tangential to a screens surface) by physically locking the corresponding axis of the device. This approach aims at using shear force not only as input, but as a new output modality that allows a coupling between the digital context created via touch and the actual physical input affordance of the device.