Technology: It’s all in the touch

The desire to use as little as possible to operate an electric device seems to have developed touchscreen technology. According to www.touchscreens.com, a touchscreen is a display which can detect the presence and location of a touch within its display area. It is any monitor, based either on LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) or CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) technology that accepts direct onscreen input. The term generally refers to touch or contact to the display of the device by a finger or hand. Touchscreens can also sense other passive objects, such as a stylus. However, if the object sensed is active, as with a light pen, the term touchscreen is generally not applicable. The development of multipoint touchscreens facilitated the tracking of more than one finger on the screen, thus operations that require more than one finger are possible. These devices also allow multiple users to interact with the touchscreen simultaneously. The touchscreen has enables you to interact with what is displayed directly on the screen as displayed, rather than indirectly with a mouse (computing) or touchpad. This makes the things more easy and convenient to handle rather than to worry about how to move the cursor at that point and which button to click and how many times and so on. It lets one do so without requiring any intermediate device, again, such as a stylus that needs to be held in the hand. The technology that was invented as early as 1980s is now appearing in commercially available systems providing a variety of types in touchscreens such as resistive, capacitive and infrared. Resistive touchscreen is one composed of several layers but the most important are two thin layers separated by thin space. These touchscreens are also less prone to contaminants that easily infect acoustic wave touchscreens. In addition, resistive touchscreens are less sensitive to the effects of severe scratches that would incapacitate capacitive touchscreens. A capacitive touchscreen panel is coated with a material that conducts a continuous electrical current across the sensor. The sensor therefore exhibits a precisely controlled field of stored electrons in both the horizontal and vertical axes. Capacitive sensors can either be touched with a bare finger or with a conductive device being held by a bare hand since a human body is also an electrical device with stored electrons thus also exhibits capacitance. Like that of an iPhone, the touchscreen with a capacitive sensor cannot be affected by outside elements and have high clarity and works based on proximity, and do not have to be directly touched to be triggered. Devices with capacitive buttons intended to be touched by a finger can often be triggered by quickly waving the palm of the hand close to the surface without touching. An infrared (IR) touchscreen panel has the most durable surface and is used in many military applications that require a touch panel display. As such, touchscreen displays are found today in airplanes, automobiles, gaming consoles, machine control systems, appliances and handheld display devices of every kind. Contact: eddiemukaaya@yahoo.com