1. THE RECET ADVANCEMENT AND APPLICATIONS IN TOUCH SCREEN TECHNOLOGY NAME:MOMOH MOHAMMED MATRIC NO:12/SMS02/058 EMS 303 ASSIGNMENT

2. INTRODUCTION 1. INTRODUCTION A touchscreen is an electronic visual display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. The term generally refers to touching the display of the device with a finger or hand. Touch screens can also sense other passive objects, such as a stylus. In other words, a touchscreen is any monitor, based either on LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) or CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) technology that accepts direct onscreen input. The ability for direct onscreen input is facilitated by an external (light pen) or an internal device (touch overlay and controller) that relays the X, Y coordinates to the computer. The touchscreen has two main attributes. First, it enables one to interact directly with what is displayed, rather than indirectly with a cursor controlled by a mouse or touchpad. Secondly, it lets one do so without requiring any intermediate device that would need to be held in the hand.

3. Touchscreens have been around for a while and between the launch of Windows*8, the meteoric rise of tablets, and touch-enabled Ultrabooks™, there’s no slowing down this technology. But is there more that can be done with a touchscreen than just swiping and typing? Microsoft’s research team recently showed off a 3D touchscreen with haptic feedback. This screen was able to provide haptic feedback for the user, giving them the ability to push 3D objects around in a virtual space: “Moving forward, the researchers hope that 3D Haptic Touch might find an application in medicine, where doctors would navigate through a patient’s 3D brain scan, looking (and feeling) for the area that requires treatment. It’s easy to imagine 3D Haptic Touch being used in education, too, allowing students to touch and feel materials that might be too dangerous or rare to handle in reality. In the PC realm, some applications might include 3D modeling and visualization apps — and I’m sure that developers are already trying to come up with games that use 3D Haptic Touch technology.” – Microsoft TechFest 2013: 3D Display with Haptic Feedback This team has also come up with something called Digits, a 3D hand tracker that changes the user’s gestures into 3D models, using a wrist sensor to control devices with simple movements. You can see a demo of Digits below: Touchscreens are especially important to a company called Senseg, who want to make touchscreens you can feel. Now, that might seem like an oxymoron, but the idea behind it is much more than that: “The company, founded in 2006, uses an ultra-low electrical current to charge very thin durable coatings (made of a proprietary substance that can be applied to "almost any surface of any size") on a standard touchscreen. This creates a small attractive force to finger skin that can be modulated; sensations such as texture, edges and vibrations can be felt by the user.” – Wired.com, “Senseg Wants to Bring Your Screens to Life” According to the article, Senseg aims at “haptifying” the entire user interface. For example, when you get a phone call, instead of peering at your phone to open up the slider, you’ll be able to feel where the slider is because of its texture on the surface of the device. Disney Research has their fingers in many different pots, including haptic technology and revolutionary new kinds of touchscreens. One of these is called REVEL: “REVEL is a new wearable tactile technology that modifies the user's tactile perception of the physical world. It can add a layer of artificial tactile texture to almost any surface or object, with very little if any instrumentation of the environment. As a result, REVEL can provide dynamic tactile sensations on touch screens as well as furniture, walls, wooden and plastic objects, and even human skin. REVEL is based on Reverse Electrovibration. It injects a weak electrical signal into anywhere on the user's body, creating an oscillating electrical field around the user's skin. When sliding his or her fingers on a surface of the object, the user perceives highly distinctive tactile textures that augment the physical object. Varying the properties of the signal provides a wide range of tactile sensations.” - Disney Research

4. 2. TYPES OF TOUCHSCREEN TECHNOLOGY The touch panels themselves are based around four basic screen technologies: Resistive, Capacitive, Surface Acoustical Wave (SAW) and Infrared (IR). Each of those designs has distinct advantages and disadvantages. The detailed study of each is as follows: 2.1 Resistive Resistive LCD touchscreen monitors rely on touch overlay, which is composed of a flexible top layer and a rigid bottom layer separated by insulating dots, attached to a touchscreen controller. The inside surface of each of the two layers is coated with a transparent metal oxide coating of Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) that facilitates a gradient across each layer when voltage is applied. Pressing the flexible top sheet creates electrical contact between the resistive layers, producing a switch closing in the circuit. The control electronics alternate voltage between the layers and pass the resulting X and Y touch coordinates to the touchscreen controller. The touchscreen controller data is then passed on to the computer operating system for processing. Resistive touch screen panels are generally more affordable but offer only 75% clarity and the layer can be damaged by sharp objects. Resistive touch screen panels are not affected by outside elements such as dust or water. Resistive touchscreens are used in food-service; retail Point-Of-Sale (POS), medical monitoring devices, portable and handheld products, industrial process control and instrumentation. Resistive Technology is divided into two broad categories: 2.1.1) 4 -Wire Resistive Touchscreen Technology Four-wire resistive technology is the simplest to understand and manufacture. It uses both the upper and lower layers in the touchscreen "sandwich" to determine the X and Y coordinates

5. 2.2 Capacitive A capacitive touch screen panel is coated with a material that stores electrical charges. When the panel is touched, a small amount of charge is drawn to the point of contact. Circuits located at each corner of the panel measure the charge and send the information to the controller for processing. Capacitive touch screen panels must be touched with a finger unlike resistive and surface wave panels that can use fingers and stylus. Capacitive touch screens have excellent clarity, and there are no moving parts to wear out. Liquids, dirt, grease, or other contaminants do not affect them. Unfortunately, gloved fingers will not activate the system. It is divided into two broad categories as follows: 2.2.1) Surface capacitive technology In this technology, only one side of the insulator is coated with a conductive layer. A small voltage is applied to the layer, resulting in a uniform electrostatic field. When a conductor, such as a human finger, touches the uncoated surface, a capacitor is dynamically formed. The sensor's controller can determine the location of the touch indirectly from the change in the capacitance as measured from the four corners of the panel. As it has no moving parts, it is moderately durable, has limited resolution and is prone to false signals from parasitic capacitive coupling. It is therefore most often used in simple applications such as industrial controls and kiosks. 2.2.2) Projected capacitive technology

6. 6. APPLICATIONS OF TOUCHSCREEN The touch screen is one of the simplest PC interfaces to use, making it the interface of choice for a large number of applications. Following are uses of touch screen: 6.1 Public Information Displays Tourism displays, trade show displays, Information kiosks and other electronic displays are used by large number of people that have little or no computing experience. The touch screen interface is easier to use than other input devices especially for novice users. A touch screen is useful to make your information more easily accessible by allowing users to navigate your presentation by simply touching the display screen. 6.2 Retail and Restaurant Systems Time is money, especially in a fast paced retail or restaurant environment. In retail or restaurant environment, touch screen systems are easy to use so employees can get work done faster

7. Historians generally consider the first finger-driven touchscreen to have been invented by E.A. Johnson in 1965 at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, United Kingdom. Johnson originally described his work in an article published in Electronics Letters. The piece featured a diagram describing a type of touchscreen mechanism that many smartphones use today—what we now know as capacitive touch. capacitive touchscreen panel uses an insulator, like glass, that is coated with a transparent conductor such as indium tin oxide (ITO). The "conductive" part is usually a human finger, which makes for a fine electrical conductor. Johnson's initial technology could only process one touch at a time, and what we'd describe today as "multitouch" was still somewhat a ways away. Touchscreen products can provide tactile feedback, and soon you won’t have to rely on visual cues from your phone or computer. This technology will be able to touchscreens will be able to differentiate textures and simulate actual computer or phone keyboards to show the difference from one key to another. Tactile feedback will have a major benefit for touchscreens on dashboards and consoles inside automobiles. Users will be able to provide input on touchscreens in the car witdifferentiate touches and change the overall user experience

8. . Soon, tactile feedback on hout taking their eyes off the roadreen, some buttons may feel smooth while others offer a rough sensation. with an extension of the pressure-sensitive LCD, eventually users may not even have to make contact with a touchscreen. Mitsubishi and Cypress are among the brands that have unveiled “hover detection” demonstrations. These screens would react when the panel is touched as well as gauge how near or far away a finger is from the surface. This so called “mouse-over” function will make touchscreen technology seem almost magical. The technology is certainly being developed, so it’s only a matter of time before touchscreens make their way into more everyday products and activities. With the increased functionality of these new advances, touchscreens can improve the quality of many common products. The classic chalkboard has also been replaced by projectors in most schools and offices. Next are smart whiteboards that pull up slides and other saved projects at the swipe of a finger. There are a common touchscreen example that will soon be transferred to other public places. They can even come with cameras that recognize gender and age to recommend beverage selections. Our mobile devices may have been among the first to utilize the functionality of a touchscreen, but they certainly won’t be the last. Technology is advancing every day, and with it, incredible power at your fingertips.

9. . CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE The touch screen interface is easier to use than other input devices. It is useful to make information more easily accessible by allowing user to navigate by simply touching the display screen. Currently the touch screens in the laptops mostly have single- touch technology. This means that the computer understands instructions a single touch at a time. Some laptops do include multi-touch capabilities; however, these capabilities are very limited and not really useful. More advanced technology like the one from Japanese Company Wacom, would bring multi- touch capabilities where people can work on more than one object simultaneously. This would bring the touch screen laptop computer capabilities nearer to the real world where people can work with their both hands with great coordination. These laptops with touch screen would allow you to touch, drag, rotate many applications or objects simultaneously, increasing the work productivity. This would help people to work naturally rather than with input devices like mice and keyboard

10. which can become a bit cumbersome specially when creating images. Touchscreens can suffer from the problem of fingerprints on the display. This can be mitigated by the use of materials with optical coatings designed to reduce the visible effects of fingerprint oils, such as the oleophobic coating used in the iPhone 3G, or by reducing skin contact by using a fingernail or stylus. The future of touch surface is touchscreen video projectors. In a restaurant, for e.g., you can place your order using the surface of the table as the touch interface, instead of using a touch screen laptop. The ability to transform any surface in a touchscreen means lower costs, making the technology more cost effective.