Imagine your smartphone or tablet screen as a flexible, elastic material. As it turns out, you might not have to wait long.

Researchers from Osaka University have developed what they are coining the “Flex” interface and it will likely be reaching cellphones and tablets before we know it.

These researches identified a key problem with standard swipe scrolling – the object you are trying to focus on moves and often gets lost in your visual perception temporarily while scrolling. This can be particularly problematic when reading a map, for example. I’m sure many of us have experienced the frustration that comes with trying to scroll a page to see something, only to spend several minutes adjusting the page to try to see what we wanted to see originally. It either scrolls too fast, causing us to backtrack and try to find our place again, or it scrolls too slowly, thus increasing our frustration level.

Using the Flex effect, the object stays the main focus while everything else stretches and distorts in the direction you swipe to accommodate the movement. Once you remove your finger, the screen reverts to its standard elasticity, but your object was moved without ever leaving your site – even for a moment.

Even better, Flex supports multi-touch! Suppose you have two points of interest – simply touch in both places and swipe. It really couldn’t be simpler. Pinch to zoom was a god-send when it was introduced and I imagine this will have an equal impact.

The next step for these researchers is to combine the two technologies in order to greatly improve the efficiency of this new interface.

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