One of the lower-key exhibits at the Engadget Expand conference last week was a table that showed a centimeter-square leaf of plastic with a wire running to it from a small panel of electronics. All the leaf did was flex and unflex, but it was doing it in response to electronic signals — and that’s a pretty good technical trick.
A few days later, the Novasentis Electro-mechanical polymer actuator won a CES Innovations Design and Engineering Award. What is does is give haptic (tactile) feedback to thin user interfaces. Think a roll-up keyboard with positive click touch and you’ve got the idea.
Here’s a video of what it looks like: