Led by Professor Jason Alexander, FORCE-UI (Force-Responsive Deformable User Interfaces) is a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project that started in 2020 and will finish in 2026.

Today's touchscreens are flat, solid surfaces that do not reproduce real-world object interaction properties such as stiffness or deformation. The EU-funded FORCE-UI project will revolutionise touch input. It aims to radically transform touchscreen-based interaction by increasing its expressivity.

The project will install together three force modalities, force input and resistive and kinetic force feedback, in a display device. It will combine advanced hardware prototyping with experimental computer science and psychophysical methodologies to establish a new model for human-computer interaction, the Force Responsive Deformable User Interfaces (FRUI).

FORCE-UI represents a revolution in touch input with considerable implications for the use of interactive systems.