Touch Screen

Always thought your skin was more than just a device to keep your insides tucked in neatly and out of harms’ way? Well, you were right. Chris Harrison has developed Skinput, a way in which your skin can become a touch screen device or your fingers buttons on a MP3 controller. Harrison says that as electronics get smaller and smaller they have become more adaptable to being worn on our bodies, but a couple of drawbacks are that the monitor and keypad/keyboard have to be big enough for us to operate the equipment. This can defeat the purpose of small devices but with the clever acoustics and impact sensing software, Harrison and his team can give your skin the same functionality as a keypad. Add a pico projector attached to an arm band, and your wrist becomes a touch screen. Read More

According to a patent recently filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Sony is working on a universal game controller that could be used with competitor consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo. The proposed controller would see an LCD touch screen positioned on the front of the controller to replace the controller's face buttons, directional pad and thumb-sticks. Read More

A 13.3-inch Capacitive In-Cell Multi-Touch LCD panel from LG is the first in-cell touch screen panel to obtain "Windows 7 Touch Logo" certification from Microsoft. The LCD panel is designed for laptops with multi-touch functions that enable simultaneous recognition of two touch points. Unlike conventional touch screens that use films to enable touch capability, the product has sensors built into the display. Read More

Samsung unveiled the Samsung Wave (S8500) in Barcelona today. The handset is the first to use Samsung’s new, open mobile platform, Samsung bada, runs a super high quality touch screen AMOLED 3.3” WVGA (800x480 pixels) display, a Social Hub to integrate contacts and connections, and TouchWiz 3.0 for an intuitive and hugely customizable user interface. The Wave runs on a high-speed homegrown CPU, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi 802.11n, has a 5 mpx camera and will be available globally from April 2010. Read More

In 1995 Hans Constin filed a patent for the Smartphone design of the well known Communicators. He still holds the worldwide patents today and has now come up with a new and clever solution for the era of touch smartphones à la iPhone. His NewCon Smartphone design has a large touch screen but when flipped open and turned, the compact Smartphone becomes a mini laptop with a full QWERTY keyboard. As much as we hate the QWERTY layout, it’s a clever design. Read More

Fujifilm has announced a host of upcoming digital camera releases, the most notable among them being the FinePix HS10 which packs 30X optical zoom and HD 1080p video at 30fps. The sophisticated bridge camera features a 10MP back-illuminated CMOS sensor with Triple Image Stabilization, can capture up to 10fps at full resolution and offers an impressive choice of shooting modes. Read More

Portuguese company Displax has announced the development of a “skin” that can turn virtually any surface into a multi-touch display. Based on capacitive technology, the “skin” is developed on a thinner-than-paper polymer film that turns a surface, be it glass, plastic or wood, curved or flat, into an interactive touch screen. The interface is so sensitive that it even detects when you blow on it, registering both the intensity and direction of the air flow. Read More

Touchscreens found in most mobile devices today use capacitance or resistance technology - fine for detecting input from a finger, but not so great when it comes to detecting how much pressure that finger is applying. However, this limitation could be about to change with news that Japanese touch screen manufacturer, Nissha, has licensed new technology that allows a touchscreen to detect pressure, even from a finger. This adds a third dimension to touchscreen interaction and opens up a raft of potential applications. Read More

From Ten One Design - the creators of the Pogo Stylus (the first capacitive touch-screen stylus for the iPhone and iPod touch) comes Autograph for iPhone – a new iPhone/iPod touch app that lets you sign off documents by creating a digital signature directly on your device’s capacitive touch screen. Read More