A comment by Keith got me thinking about how to show the tiny actuators actually working on video, because it’s all very small and a vibrating pin just becomes fuzzy to the eye. What did the trick was simply attaching a piece of 130 grams paper to the pin with a bit of blu-tack and then reducing the frequency to show movement clearly.
The video below shows an actuator from the proof-of-concept display between my fingers, driven at 10Hz, on-and-off for one second repeatedly:
The pin has to be held down because the retaining mechanism is in the frame.
Next video is similar but with a slimmer actuator (1mm core, won’t fit current frames), this time with a small lens attached to the phone (blu-tack again to the rescue) for better close-up focus, and sound turned off because the kids were noisy (hey, it’s weekend!):
Upcoming: a series about current actuator core / coil design, including 3D (CAD) images!
TACTACT 
Thanks for these first videos.
> The pin has to be held down because the retaining mechanism is in the frame.
On thinking some about this actuator design, can I assume that the ‘retaining mechanism’ is a simple compression spring?
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