"We're finding that when you rub a natural biological surface that has an orientation - that has a grain, if you will - and you run that grain perpendicularly to the long axis of the ridges, we find a dramatic increase in friction, " Dr Dominy told BBC News.
We're not going to front like we understand exactly how it works, but two IBM researchers in California have announced that they've gotten closer to controlling the orientation and magnetic spin of individual iron atoms on a copper surface, which would have huge implications for nanotech storage -- imagine the basic tech in your hard drive shrunk down the molecular level.
The capacitive display can recognize orientation, letting you drop the controller in any position throughout the surface, then outputting a map to match.