Apple’s pressure-sensitive 3D Touch feature didn’t find its way to the cheaper iPhone SE, probably because of the cost of a touch-sensitive panel. But what if the SE — and any other phone with a speaker and mic — could have their own, slightly MacGuyver version of 3D Touch?
That’s exactly what engineers at the University of Michigan have done, with a piece of software called ForcePhone. The tech works by emitting an inaudible tone at 18kHz, outside the range of human hearing. That tone is ever-so-slightly changed when the phone is pressed or squeezed, and the phone’s mic picks up on that tone change, and thereby lets the phone detect a particularly hard finger-tap.
