Assuming this is real, the future looks… textured.
on January 25, 2013 at 11:02 AMAs far as I know, this isn’t a joke. It’s an ad for a new kind of technology that allows tablet surfaces to produce tactile keys, temporarily:
Of course, this can’t be the only possible use one could come up with for this “bumps on demand” concept, and we’ll just assume everyone immediately thought of that one and move on to more family-friendly concepts:
• Eternal bubble wrap. If someone wants to ship me something wrapped in tablets, that’s great, but I figure a whole pad of bumps you can pop while you’re bored will be a primary function of this technology.
• A washboard for those minor garment cleanings you occasionally need while in a hotel (this needs to be preceded by some kind of waterproofing, but that should be a snap at this point, right?). The real purpose of this setup (with a special stylus, purchased separately) would be to allow the user to play the Ozarks-born smash hit music video game, “Jug Band.”
• A cheese grater for exceptionally soft or crumbly cheese.
• One more exciting and/or unnerving sensation to have going on in your pocket-area when you get a phone call.
• If the bumps can be made large enough and emerge fast enough, it has potential as an cat startling/repulsion system.
Maybe it’ll be a thing, maybe it’s just a Consumer Electronics Show pie-in-the-sky concept. Maybe it’s how the T-1000 got its start before being sent after Sarah Connor. I’d just keep it away from those quadrotor swarms the robotics geeks keep making, as they’re already scary enough. 
I’ve taken a look at the whitepaper, and it seems to be real. The catch: Button patterns are pre-set at the time of manufacturing (though you can have more than one set configured).
It works by pumping fluid under the buttons to inflate them. The clever bits were using a fluid index-matched to the plastic substrate (so that you can’t see the fluid channels), and getting the whole system to work in a slab less than 1 mm thick. I’d have to dig through their patents to see how they actually managed that, as the whitepaper is short on details (could be something MEMS-ish in the slab, or it could be a small pump off at one edge of the display, or it could be a larger-scale deformable bladder type of system, or it could be something entirely different).
In principle you could build a system using similar technology with arbitrary bump “pixels” that you can reconfigure, but in practice that’d be tricky to do with this technology, as the inflatable buttons all have to be sealed at their edges (so you can’t have two different configurations with buttons that partly overlap). Still handy for its intended application, though: I hate using tablet keyboards for exactly the reason they mention (no tactile feedback).
i know you were coming up with joke idas but i have one really good NON joke use for this: Braille ebook readers/tablets
Touchscreen controls in cars are a pain. I like having buttons you can feel for without having to look. This could fix that problem.
It says the video is private; I can’t see it.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/982f/?pfm=Search&t=electronic%20bubble%20wrap%20keychain
My wife has one and loves it.