If you used touchscreen devices, sometimes you might have felt that it would be nice to have something like the "mouse-over" events in computers. It would be a nice feature to have but after all these years neither Apple nor Google did anything about it. Recently I had this idea for "finger-over" in touch screen devices. I don't know Electronics Engineering so my concept may be wrong. Or may be it's already implemented. Watch out for my ugly (mspaint) drawings.
Almost all touchscreen phones have proximity sensors. Replace it with 4 proximity sensor (or whatever best suited for the purpose) on 4 corners of the screen behind the screen. They should be of different frequencies and should point towards the center.
Now we can find the exact position of the finger using the differences from the waves. If the sensors are capable of generating a 3d imaging of the finger, then the tip of the finger can be found. Nowadays softwares can recognize faces so finding a tip of a finger wont be difficult. If 3d imaging is not possible, then atleast the tip of the finger can be found by setting a threshold limit (0.5-1.0cm as I said previously). That's all there is to it.
Edit: This is not similar to what is already done in Microsoft Surface. If you put a glass of Mango juice, the surrounding surface changes to yellow. It looks like surface uses Optical camera on 4 corners to find the color but it depends on touch and not hover. It will work only if you put something "on" it.
Benefits to users:
If this is done, then users can enjoy the "finger-over" in touchscreen devices.
1. Websites that use mouseover event in javascript can be expected to work.
2. There is a new System bar in Icecream Sandwich that always appear below the screen. It would be nice if it appears only if finger tip is near the bottom of the screen. The system bar will not be visible, then appears translucently if finger is near the bottom the screen and fully visible when touched. For a nice effect, we can vary the degree of translucence directly proportional to the distance between the finger and the screen. This I really wish to happen.
3. Most obvious use. If user is clueless of what a button does, then he can simply hover the finger over the button for a while until a tooltip shows up.
Device Manufacturers:
This will be an extra headache for device manufacturers as it may be require 4 sensors below or adjacent to screen which increases the phone thickness, complex circuitry, reduced battery hours. But this can be an optional feature.
For developers:
Developers can expect methods like onFingerOver(), onFingerOver(customtimeout) :P
Such methods obviously execute before (and may be also after) click events.
Lets say that not all manufacturers support this hardware feature. In that case, the developers need not worry if they used FingerOver events for showing tooltip only. But if they use FingerOver events to display a panel or something like the system bar, then developers (or Android itself) should replace it with Swipe event(like notification area).
Nothing is impossible. Even if my concept is wrong, something like this will happen in the future. Let us see :)
