@paco @vees Apple has filed a bunch of patents around reconfigurable surfaces on top of a multitouch sensor going back around 15 years. There are still a lot of problems to overcome.

Modern multitouch controllers are basically a specialized camera (like digital x-ray film) with internal image feature recognition. They scan the capacitive sensor grid and determine the capacitance present at each point, then they detect what regions of higher capacitance should be communicated as touch points. The recognition can generally also differentiate between pressures because fingers are squishy. As you press harder, the image of the touch becomes bigger and the edges become sharper. This isn’t really used today, but there’s no fundamental reason it couldn’t be.