Attività

How Does Touch Screen Technology Work?

If you’re old enough to remember 1990, that’s the year MC Hammer released his signature, Grammy-nominated song “U Can’t Touch This.” Hammer may have looked great rapping in parachute pants but he wasn’t that great at prognosticating. Within 15 years people were indeed touching it . . . and they were about to touch it a whole lot more after 2007, once Apple released its groundbreaking iPhone, the first handheld device ever shipped with a multi-touch display. Today, the appetite for high-quality interactive displays has spawned a massive industry with sales by 2018 expected to reach $31.9 billion. Though the display-user interface is now ubiquitous and so intuitive that even infants seem to know how to swipe left and right, we sometimes forget how truly revolutionary and disruptive this technology was when it was introduced.

Touch-device shipment and revenue will continue to rise year over year, peaking in 2019, according to market-data insight firm IHS DisplaySearch. Some touchscreens employ pressure sensors to detect contact, while some use visible or infrared light, and still others use sound waves. The broad range of environments and conditions under which the displays are deployed has required designers and manufacturers to get creative. Let’s take a look at some of the different types of touch technology, how they function, and what their advantages are in terms of reliability, durability, accuracy, size, number of touch points and, of course, cost.