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docdivakar
@R_Colin_Johnson: thank you, good summary on the state-of-the-art of touch ...
cdhmanning
Perhaps voice will work for dictating letters and such, but never for writing ...
Touch mania swipes across markets
R Colin Johnson
6/7/2011 10:13 AM EDT
Touchscreens have been available since the days of cathode-ray tubes, but the technology didn’t really catch on with consumers until mobile phone makers adopted it to solve the tiny-button problem. Now touchscreen smartphones and tablets collectively constitute the fastest-growing electronics market segment.
According to DisplaySearch (Santa Clara, Calif.), shipments of touchscreen tablets are forecast to reach 60 million units in 2011 and could top 260 million units by 2016. Add to that the more than 400 million mobile phone touchscreens predicted by IHS iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.), and the total market could top $10 billion this year (see sidebar, last page).
“Touchscreens have been around for a long time, but they were only popular in business and industrial settings, such as food service, airport kiosks and industrial keypads,” said Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at IHS iSuppli. “The real transition for consumers … was when Apple moved into smartphones and then tablets. Before then, consumer touchscreens didn’t work very well, because they had to operate a standard OS. But with the move to smartphones and tablets, operating systems like iOS have enabled a very touch-friendly user interface.”
Google’s Android OS—the first major competitor to Apple’s iOS—-did not support multitouch at introduction, but the latest incarnation accommodates a wide array of multitouch gestures. Some of them—including spin, thrust and slice—are unique to Android; all will work identically on any Android smartphone or touchscreen tablet. The BlackBerry Tablet OS and Windows Phone OS have similarly become touch-enabled.
“Handset makers used to give us a long list of obstacles to adopting touchscreens, but when Apple introduced the iPhone all those obstacles suddenly seemed surmountable,” said Andrew Hsu, technology strategist at Synaptics Inc.
(Santa Clara, Calif.). Synaptics began as an evangelist for the benefits of touchpads as a substitute for a PC mouse but has since reinvented itself as a touchscreen controller supplier for mobile handsets. It claims a number of major design wins, including one in Google’s Nexus One smartphone.
 Click on image to enlarge. |
Just a handful of contrary trends threaten the touchscreen industry. Foremost are competing technologies that deliver a similar user experience without the expensive touchscreen hardware, such as the 3-D gesture recognition made possible by Microsoft’s Kinect gaming interface, which uses cameras and pattern recognition to sidestep the need for the sensors required by handheld controllers. Kinect-like 3-D gesture recognition, using infrared rangefinder technology Microsoft acquired from Canesta, is being downsized for Windows phones and tablets. Armed with a touch-enabled version of Windows that works across all device sizes—from its own 40-inch Surface to its licensed touchscreen tablets and smartphones—Microsoft could redefine the touchscreen landscape.
Meanwhile, all the LCD makers are retooling their manufacturing lines to incorporate touchscreen sensors directly into their displays, a move that would eliminate the need for today’s OEM add-ons. Samsung and Nokia, for instance, have already integrated touchscreens into organic LED displays for their respective Galaxy S and N8 smartphones.
Alternative materials for integrated touchscreen sensors are also on the horizon, including Cambrios Technologies’ ClearOhm transparent conductors, using silver nanowires; C3Nano’s carbon nanotube films; 3M’s copper-mesh films; repurposed polyethylenedioxythiophene conductive polymers; and epitaxial graphene films from a variety of vendors. All aim to slash the cost of touch sensors over the increasingly rare indium tin oxide (ITO) used for touch sensors today.
 Touchscreens consist of a transparent sensor layer attached directly to the controller chip and sandwiched between a top glass cover and the display on the bottom. Click on image to enlarge. |
 Typical layer stacks for resistive (left) and capacitive (right) screens. Click on image to enlarge. |
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Duane Benson
6/7/2011 11:26 AM EDT
There was a time when mice were only fully utilized by special applications. And, there are still some applications that don't use mice. Not many, but some. Can you imagine a typical day at the computer without one now?
It won't be too long before touch screens are ubiquitous, first on mobile devices and eventually even on desktops. The combination of a mouse, keyboard and touch screen will give users an incredible amount of flexibility in controlling application software.
Somehow, though, we still have to figure out how to keep the fingerprints down though.
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cdhmanning
6/9/2011 11:41 PM EDT
I really don't think touch will every be popular for desktops.
Just try to simulate the experience. Reaching forward to touch a screen at a seated workstation is really slow and doing a lot would cause your arms to tire quickly.
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danlutes
6/7/2011 5:08 PM EDT
"operating systems like iOS have enabled a very touch-friendly user interface.”
PalmOs was very touch friendly, in fact it was almost completely touch based. I wonder how Palm managed to miss the boat, other than being an attractive acquisition target for HP?
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Code Monkey
6/7/2011 5:29 PM EDT
Apple's hardware-assisted flickable window, which maps part of the screen onto a roomy frame buffer, combined with the finger-friendly interface was the real breakthrough. I think Apple thought of it first because they were into capacitive gesture scrolling interfaces. The flickable window was the next step.
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goafrit
6/8/2011 8:04 AM EDT
People think that technology decides winners, always. Not always. It is about perception. The cool thing about this is because of Apple. They made us imagined it and then the market came up. It is not just the technology.
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cdhmanning
6/9/2011 11:43 PM EDT
Yes and no... Apple certainly sold the world on using a touch screen with your fingers rather than with a stylis.
Apple could never have done this with old resistive touch though. The old resistive methods just can't produce the accuracy that Apple gets when you type on a touch screen.
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t.alex
6/8/2011 12:28 PM EDT
Perhaps it was the UI design and the limited number of apps. Only with cool apps can we fully exploit the usefulness of touchscreen.
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LSBCAL
6/7/2011 5:57 PM EDT
I think touchscreens are great for small screens, not for desktop screens though. There I don't want my hands to leave the keyboard and sometimes even the mouse is a hassle. Now what we really need is cheap voice recognition. Would be nice for GPS apps.
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prabhakar_deosthali
6/8/2011 12:21 AM EDT
It is now high time to change the PC keyboards to the touch pads. This can have advantages of the keyboards showing the selected font/ selected language( such as Chinese, Indian etc) alphabets and special characters on the keyboard instead of having the standard QWERTY layout.
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David Ashton
6/8/2011 6:54 AM EDT
Have you tried actually TYPING on a touch pad - or those keyboards without tactile feedback? It's very difficult. Touch pad keyboards are great for entering short text - eg names or addresses - but for serious typing I think the humble keyboard will be around for a bit yet....
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R_Colin_Johnson
6/8/2011 6:40 PM EDT
One vendor not covered in my report does claim to have tactile feedback built into its touchscreens. Maxim has a demo it is showing here: http://bit.ly/kshmuJ
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David Ashton
6/8/2011 7:00 AM EDT
If anything is going to usurp the keyboard it will be voice recognition. Use the touch pad to select your language, then talk your input. It's got a way to go though.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYpLyrPKU78
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cdhmanning
6/9/2011 11:47 PM EDT
Perhaps voice will work for dictating letters and such, but never for writing code or similar when you need to say the names of symbols.
I've seen someone dictate a python program. It was painful. C would have been worse.
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agk
6/8/2011 4:52 AM EDT
I often noticed the ATM touch screen do not respond to my touches. What i do is i rub my fingers and then operate. This is probably my skin resistance is more. Hope this issue is taken care in cell phone touch screens designs.
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chanj
6/8/2011 11:27 AM EDT
The responsiveness of a touch panel requires a lot of tuning. Apple has done a great job.
Touch screen didn't get popular until gestures recognition is "created". With it, user can do more. I agree that Touchscreen is good for mobile device. I don't think it can replace mouse and keyboard. However, the 3D gestures recognition like what Kinect is delivered may have a chance.
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BobbieSmith
6/8/2011 1:12 PM EDT
Those who complain that they need the tactile feel of keystrokes need to realize that the future is touch based. (And I agree further in the future, voice based)
Typing on a keyboard is loud and annoying. Typing on a touchscreen is silent. Ask my wife when I bring my laptop to bed.
Imagine the people who grew up with the first typewriters. The kind that physically hurl the inked letter to the paper. Did they complain when they switched from the manual to electromechanical versions? "I like to see my letters fly through space and land on my paper"
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Duane Benson
6/8/2011 7:21 PM EDT
It's not the lack of tactile feedback that gets me off balance on touch screens. For me, it's more a case of finger positioning. I seem to be happy if I can have some sort of audible key press feedback instead of a mechanical action. Mechanical is best, but, for me, audible works too.
However, I really struggle with specific finger positions. This is where the tactile feedback is needed for me. An overlay that's transparent and flat over the key area, but with small ridges around the outline for the key might just solve the problem for me. The touch keypad could have the ridges there permanently, but then some of the flexibility would be gone. You could customize character sets or key arrangement (Dvorak), but you couldn't change the size or number of keys.
Alternately, the ridges could be on a thin overlay as you sometimes see for computer game commands. That way, you could use it with or without the ridges and you'd have all of the flexibility as well as tactile information for positioning.
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docdivakar
6/10/2011 4:31 PM EDT
@R_Colin_Johnson: thank you, good summary on the state-of-the-art of touch technology.
EE Times had a number of publications on the geopolitical ramifications of supply chain that source rare earth metals not too long ago. I think the optical touch technology seems to have good promise. I particularly like the technology developed by NextWindow cited in the article:
http://www.nextwindow.com/index.html
@David Ashton: NextWindow's technology will probably alleviate some of the difficulties users may face in touch-screen keyboards. Depending on the resolution in placement of the light sources and detectors, it will be possible to limit double- or wrong-entries of inputs.
MP Divakar
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