According to Neonode,
zForce requires few components
and involves an
easy, straightforward manufacturing
process compared to
more expensive, layered capacitive
and resistive touchscreens.
Featured in the Neonode N2 mobile
phone, zForce is also viable in digital cameras,
GPS products, and laptops (Fig. 4).
Known for its pen tablets and interactive
pen displays, Wacom announced in April
what it calls a major innovation in capacitive
touchscreens. The patent-pending Reversing
Ramped Field Capacitive (RRFC) touch technology
employs unique low-power circuitry
and reversing-ramped electrostatic fields to
deliver pinpoint precision and drift-free performance.
RRFC integrates into dual-input applications
with the company’s EMR pen-input
technology for Tablet PC OEMs, or it can
operate standalone on other platforms requiring
just a finger-touch interface.
“RRFC’s controller processing methods and
system design provide extremely accurate pointing
at much lower power consumption levels
and without increased cost,” says Shawn Gray,
Wacom’s director of touchscreen operations.
“These factors and others, such as ease of
integration and stability, position RRFC touch as
a natural alternative to resistive, surface acoustic
wave, and infrared touch technologies.”
Compared to resistive capacitive touchscreens,
Wacom says, RRFC boosts transmissivity
up to 95% and requires significantly less
pressure to activate. In addition, the company
says the RRFC touchscreen is tougher than
glass, virtually eliminating wear and scratching.
Targeting broadcasters and users working in
multi-viewer applications where space is limited
and video sources numerous, the Touch-it
Digital multichannel video monitor and controller
from Wohler Technologies teams up adjacent
7-in. color LCDs in 3RU of space. The unit
provides real-time monitoring and routing of up
to 16 channels of multirate HD/SD-SDI video.
The LCD on the left in Figure 5 is a touchscreen
that displays from four to 16 thumbnail
images, all of which automatically scale to fill
the screen. Touching one of the thumbnails
transfers the image to the LCD on the right.
The HD/SD-SDI source signal
becomes available on the system’s
binary network connector
(BNC) outputs. Also, a BNC output
for the touchscreen lets users view the
thumbnails on an external display if necessary.
“The unit offers versatile, full-screen resolution
viewing of any video source with a single
tap to the screen, making it easy for operators
to select and focus in on any of 16 HD/SD-SDI
mixed inputs,” says Wohler president and CEO
Carl J. Dempsey. “Of note, the Touch-it Digital
supports field upgrades for any emerging features
and functions over the life of the unit.”
Also gaining momentum in applications from
medical to gaming, TouchSense technology
from Immersion makes buttons on a touchscreen
feel like their mechanical counterparts.
A touchscreen controller imparts input and
location to a software application that transmits
the desired tactile effects to a proprietary
TouchSense controller, which vibrates the
touchscreen at various frequencies using different
wave shapes, levels, and durations.
The application software determines the
particular tactile feel of each button on the
screen. It also allows the individual programming
of each button, giving each a unique
feel. Synchronizable with sounds and images,
the technology is compatible with flat-screen
sizes ranging from 2 to beyond 19 in. and
supports a range of standard sensors. For portable
products, TouchSense Mobile employs
a TouchSense executable and handles touchscreen
sizes up to 15 cm diagonal.
Late last year, Tyco Electronics enlisted AMI
Semiconductor to develop a chip that would
allow Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR) touch
technology to be ported from Tyco’s Elo Touch
Systems group into handheld applications, such
as cell phones and GPS units. APR borrows
from a number of existing touch technologies
and provides an alternative to capacitive and
resistive implementations. APR, which is audiobased,
recognizes sounds created when the screen is touched at a preset position. This
approach accurately detects input via finger, fingernail,
gloved hand, or stylus. The technology
also includes palm rejection functionality.
There appears to be no news of
progress on AMI’s chip, which has
since come under the umbrella of
ON Semiconductor. Yet there’s no
slowdown in the development of
APR-based products. Earlier this
year, Tyco introduced the Elo 17A2
touch computer sporting a 17-in.
touchscreen LCD (Fig. 6). Groomed
for the point-of-service market, this
computer with dual-display capability
offers a choice of the company’s
touch technologies: AccuTouch
Five-Wire Resistive, IntelliTouch Surface Wave,
CarrollTouch Infrared, and/or APR.
In addition to the 17A2 LCD’s SXGA resolution
and 5-by-4 aspect ratio, the system
features a 1-GHz Celeron M processor with a
400-MHz front-side bus (FSB), up to 1.5 Gbytes
of DDR2 RAM, a mini-PCI slot, two serial and
four USB 2.0 interfaces, and one Ethernet port.
Operating-system support consists of Windows
XP Pro/XP Embedded/Vista Business.
WHAT ABOUT SPEECH RECOGNITION?
We don’t hear too much about speech recognition,
the technology that may have completely
sent the mechanical keyboard to recycle-land.
It’s employed extensively in commercial telephone
applications, i.e., customer service calls.
But despite the improvements in many available
consumer and business applications, it hasn’t
entered the mainstream yet.
Speech recognition has failed to catch on
for a number of reasons. Some applications
require users to speak literally rather than
naturally, pronouncing punctuation marks and
symbols. In many cases, users have to teach
the program any special characters, phrases,
acronyms, and other language peculiarities.
Also, in a populated office with numerous
cubicles, speech recognition is impractical.
Imagine several coworkers in adjacent cubicles
speaking to their computers simultaneously. So
until some breakthroughs happen, don’t throw
out those QWERTY keyboards.