I don’t think it’s so much a materials challenge as a manufacturing one. Putting a multitouch digitizer uniformly over the surface of a sphere is AFAIK a unique challenge.
I’m not sure how you could make the ball slightly squeezable yet hard and acceptably round to make for a nice trackball experience. As the OP points out, it’s easy to notice when things aren’t perfectly round. I think the best thing to do would be to just use the touch sensors, but I’m not super deep in the sensors world, maybe their is some sort of internal stress sensor that you could use to see if it is getting squeezed.
I think you’d have to switch the fixed magnet into the trackball, as I can’t see electromagnets of sufficient strength working on power beamed inside a ball. You need a “magic” algorithm and some fancy electormagnets in the base to try and attempt to create an “increased resistance” mode as you descri e. Alone this is a very interesting, and I suspect difficult problem that may have some prior art. I’m not an EE, but I feel like this is something that one might be able to do some back of the envelope calculations on to see if the adequate force is realistic given space and power constraints. One thought I had is that you might be able to use the resistance between emf fields and conductors, but without some sort of exotic metamaterial I don’t think you could get adequate resistance.
Anyway, I can only think of one company that could take this on, Apple. And if Apple got on it, one thing that would be neat is if the ball had xyz linear actuators so that it would click.
I’m not sure how you could make the ball slightly squeezable yet hard and acceptably round to make for a nice trackball experience. As the OP points out, it’s easy to notice when things aren’t perfectly round. I think the best thing to do would be to just use the touch sensors, but I’m not super deep in the sensors world, maybe their is some sort of internal stress sensor that you could use to see if it is getting squeezed.
I think you’d have to switch the fixed magnet into the trackball, as I can’t see electromagnets of sufficient strength working on power beamed inside a ball. You need a “magic” algorithm and some fancy electormagnets in the base to try and attempt to create an “increased resistance” mode as you descri e. Alone this is a very interesting, and I suspect difficult problem that may have some prior art. I’m not an EE, but I feel like this is something that one might be able to do some back of the envelope calculations on to see if the adequate force is realistic given space and power constraints. One thought I had is that you might be able to use the resistance between emf fields and conductors, but without some sort of exotic metamaterial I don’t think you could get adequate resistance.
Anyway, I can only think of one company that could take this on, Apple. And if Apple got on it, one thing that would be neat is if the ball had xyz linear actuators so that it would click.