While touchscreens might feel fascinating, they are not that modern at all. These are around since the mid-19th century.
These types of screens act as both an input and output device. Means, a user can provide input to the touchscreen device through simply touching the screen with the fingers or a stylus.
A device which has a touch screen feature doesn’t necessarily need other input tools like mouse or touchpad.
Today, touchscreen technology functionality has become very common and some of the devices which inhibit this feature are smartphones, gaming consoles, laptops, POS systems, e-readers, ATMs, etc.
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Types of Touchscreen Technology
There is various kind of touchscreen technologies available in the market, here’s a complete list:
1. Resistive Touchscreen
It has several thin layers with two transparent electrically resistive layers. These two layers are very important and face each other with a thin gap in between.
These kinds of technologies are highly tolerant towards liquids that’s why these are generally used in restaurants, factories, and hospitals.
2. Capacitive Touchscreen
It has an insulator layer like glass and is coated with a transparent & conducting alloy like ITO (Indium Tin Oxide).
These kinds of screens are highly accurate in detecting the given input and capacitive touch screens are generally used in smartphone devices like iPhone and Samsung.
3. Infrared Grid Touchscreen
As the name suggests, it uses a combination of X-Y infrared LED and photodetector pairs. It tries to detect the disruption in the LED beams pattern and provides output accordingly.
These IR touchscreens are more durable than that of the capacitive and resistive touchscreens but not that accurate.
4. Optical Imaging Touchscreen
These are a kind of modern development in the field which used various (generally two) image sensors to identify the user input on the surface.
As a user touches the surface anywhere, some camera lights get blocked and the device gets the input.
5. Surface Acoustic Wave
In SAW of the surface acoustic wave, ultrasonic waves pass over the touchscreen panel and when someone touches the panel, some portion of the waves get absorbed.
This type of touchscreens are not very commonly used and can start malfunctioning even with some small contaminants on the surface.
6. Dispersive Signal Touchscreen
This technology works by measuring the piezoelectricity in the glass. A dispersive signal touchscreen detects the exact location of a touch by interpreting the piezoelectricity feature.
The technology is very tolerant towards dust, scratches or any other kinds of outside elements.
7. Acoustic Pulse Recognition
This is a very unique technology in the field of the touch screen revolution. When touched, it produces a unique sound wave using which the sensors detect the exact location of the touch and shows the output accordingly.
8. Infrared Acrylic Projection
The infrared acrylic sheet displays information by using a translucent acrylic sheet as a rear-projection screen. When the user touches the screen, the cameras detect the leakage of the infrared light and shows output accordingly.
The best example of this touchscreen technology is Microsoft’s PixelSense tablets.
Wrapping it up
Innovation in the field of touch screen technology is going on and we are seeing some advanced and improved version of the technology regularly.
Now, it is possible to project the screen on any hard surface and then it can act as a touchscreen – both input and output. And, those days are not far when the technology won’t even need a physical surface in order to function.
In the near future, we might see some more durable, tolerant and smart touch screens in our day-to-day use.
That’s it.
If you have any related query, feel free to let us know in the comments.