A Touch Technology For Every Application

The popularity of touchscreen technology is growing immensely. You can find touchscreens available in grocery store self checkouts, movie rental kiosks and at airport check-in kiosks around the world. So, how do you decide which touch technology will work best for your specific application?

Just like displays, there are a variety of technologies that are best suited for the specific application, use and environment. Life cycle costs play a major role in choosing a touchscreen.

Resistive touch still dominates the marketplace, capturing approximately one-half of the touch market. Its low cost, stylus independence and technology maturity make for a difficult combination for other touch technologies to compete against.

In the small screen size (less than 4"), the projective capacitive touch sensor has made a strong entry into the market, resulting from Apple's iPhone introduction. It has spurred additional development with glass on glass resistive touch screens.

Large screen sizes (larger than 32") are being supplied with IR camera systems, which are relatively inexpensive and easily scalable.

Traditional surface capacitive, matrix IR and surface acoustic wave touch technologies dominate the mid-size (6" to 26"). Again, use, environment and cost play important roles in choosing the optimum technology.

With the myriad of choices in touch technology available for today's applications, which one suits your display function needs best? Look for the best touch technology for a rugged or outdoor environment in an upcomming post.

See-through Touchscreen

We are obviously fans of transparent displays. Transparency opens up new possibilities for how people can interact with information. Here's a video, featured in New Scientist, that demonstrates how transparency and a touchscreen can be combined in unique ways. The demo of the NanoTouch was created by Microsoft.

Multi-touch Experimentation

We love IDEO's approach to solving design challenges. They've been applying some of their design thinking skills to prototyping a multi-touch system. They have even open sourced the project. You can get a backstage view of their home-brew multi-touch project on the IDEO Labs blog.

Anyone else experimenting with mult-touch? We're interested in hearing about the highs and lows of your experiences. Tell us more.

What Touch Technology Should I Use?

Spend 90 seconds to get a short answer from Al Gard, our Director of Engineering.




Let us know if there are any other topics you want to know more about.