Nvidia shows off software-based pressure sensitive display

It seems that you will no longer need a specialized stylus like the Galaxy Note 2's S Pen to etch out a sketch on your smartphone.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang writes his name in Mandarin.

Are you one of those who love drawing on a smartphone but bemoan the fact that you need a Galaxy Note 2 to get the precise strokes required for your masterpiece?

Well, the good news is that Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a software-based pressure sensitive display powered by the company's Tegra 4 chipset, and he was using a normal non-digitizer stylus to draw on it.

The trick behind the tech lies in Nvidia's Prism display, introduced with the Tegra 3. Prism basically reads the screen and optimizes pixels and brightness to save battery life. For the Tegra 4, Nvidia uses the same technique to detect how an ordinary capacitive stylus interacts with the screen.

The software is able to sense how much the stylus' head is pressing down on the display at the point of writing and adjusts the stroke sizes accordingly. Huang also flipped the stylus around to erase what he wrote, and because the stylus had a specific thickness at that end, it's able to "know" that it should be erasing.

Nvidia also said that the software will be made available to all Tegra 4 devices -- this means you don't need the Wacom-powered S Pen or similar styli for drawing.