Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen

Vertical touch screen monitor

Updated 02/11 to include additional details about the touchscreen
Turning your monitor into a touchscreen could some day be as simple as peel … and stick.
Displax, a Portugal-based company, promises to turn any surface — flat or curved — into a touch-sensitive display. The company is offering a thinner-than-paper polymer film that can be stuck on glass, plastic or wood to turn it into an interactive input device.
“It is extremely powerful, precise and versatile,” says Miguel Fonseca, chief business officer at Displax. “You can use our film with on top of anything including E Ink, OLED and LCD displays.”
Human-computer interaction that goes beyond keyboards and mouse has become a hot new area of emerging technology. Since Apple popularized the swipe and pinch gestures with the iPhone, touch has become a new frontier in the way we interact with our devices.
In the past, students have shown a touchscreen where pop-up buttons and keypads can dynamically appear and disappear. That allows the user to experience the physical feel of buttons on a touchscreen. In 2008, Microsoft offered Surface, a multitouch product that allows users to manipulate information using gesture recognition.
Displax’s films range from 3 inches to 120 inches diagonally.
“If Displax can do this for larger displays, it will really be one of the first companies to do what we call massive multitouch,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who focuses on multitouch and gestural computing. “If you look at existing commercial technology for large touch displays, they use infrared camera that can sense only two to four points of contact. Displax takes us to the next step.”
Displax’ latest technology works on both opaque and transparent surfaces. The films have a 98 percent transparency — a measure of the amount of light that is reflected through the surface. “That’s a pretty decent transmission rate,” says Wigdor.
A grid of nanowires are embedded in the thin polymer film that is just about 100 microns thick. A microcontroller processes the multiple input signals it receives from the grid. A finger or two placed on the screen causes an electrical disturbance. The microcontroller analyzes this to decode the location of each input on that grid. The film comes with its own firmware, driver — which connect via a USB connection — and a control panel for user calibration and settings.
Currently, it can detect up to 16 fingers on a 50-inch screen. And the projective capacitance technology that Displax uses is similar to that seen on the iPhone, so the responsiveness of the touch surface is great, says Fonseca.
Displax has created the multitouch microcontroller that helps the detection and processing of multiple signals from the nanowire grid. The nanowire grid is licensed from other companies such as Visual Planet.
And if feeling around the screen isn’t enough, Displax allows users to interact with the screen by blowing on it. Displax says the technology can also be applied to standard LCD screens.
Displax’s versatility could make it valuable for a new generation of displays that are powering devices such as e-readers. For instance, at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, Pixel Qi showed low-power displays that can switch between an active color LCD mode and an e-reader-like, low-power black-and-white mode. Pixel Qi’s displays, along with other emerging display technologies from the likes of Qualcomm’s Mirasol  and E Ink’s color screen are keenly awaited in new products because they promise to offer a good e-reader and a netbook in a single device.
But touch is a feature that is missing in these emerging displays. Displax could help solve that problem.
It is also more versatile than Microsoft Surface, says Fonseca. “Our film is about 100 microns thick, while Surface is about 23 inches deep,” he says. “So we can slip into any hardware. Surface cannot be used with LCD screens so that can be a big limiting factor.”
The comparisons to Surface may not be entirely fair, says Wigdor. “Surface is not just another hardware solution,” he says. “It includes integrated software applications and vision technology so it can respond to just the shape of the object.”
Still he says, Displax’s thin film offers a big breakthrough for display manufacturers because it they don’t have to make changes to their manufacturing process to use it. Displax says the first screens featuring its multitouch technology will start shipping in July.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/thin-film-touchscreen/