Touchscreens

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: July 21, 2014.

nce upon a time, the way to get a computer to do something useful

was to feed it a stack of cards with holes punched into them. Thankfully, things
have moved on a lot since then. Now we can get our computers to do things
simply by pointing and clicking with a mouseor even by speaking ordinary
commands with voice recognition software. But there's a revolution coming
that will make computers even easier to usewith touch-sensitive
screens. Cellphones like Apple's iPhone,ebook readers, and some MP3
players already work with simple, touch controlsand computers are starting
to work that way too. Touchscreens are intuitively easy to use, but how exactly
do they work?
Photo: Left: The Sony ebook Reader features an infrared touchscreen (described in more detail below). That
eliminates the need for a separate keyboard and allows the gadget to be much smaller and more portable. You
press the screen to turn pages and create bookmarks, and you can use a pop-up on-screen keyboard to make
notes in the books you're reading, as I'm doing here.

Keyboards and switches

A touchscreen is a bit like an invisible keyboard glued to the front of your

computer monitor. To understand how it works, it helps if you know something
about how an ordinary keyboard works first. You can find out about that in our
article on computer keyboards, but here's a quick reminder. Essentially, every
key on a keyboard is anelectrical switch. When you push a key down, you
complete an electric circuit and a current flows. The current varies according
to the key you press and that's how your computer figures out what you're
typing.
In a bit more detail, here's what happens. Inside a keyboard, you'll find there
are two layers of electrically conducting plastic separated by an insulating
plastic membrane with holes in it. In fact, there's one hole underneath each
key. When you press a key, you push the top conductor layer down towards
the bottom layer so the two layers meet and touch through the hole. A current
flows between the layers and the computer knows you've pressed a key. Little
springy pieces of rubber underneath each key make them bounce back to
their original position, breaking the circuit when you release them.

Touchscreens have to achieve something similar to this on the surface on your

computer screen. Obviously they can't use switches, membranes, and bits of
plastic or they'd block the view of the screen below. So they have to use more
cunning tricks for sensing your touchcompletely invisibly!
Photo: This is the sensitive, switch layer from inside a typical PC keyboard. It rests under the keys and detects
when you press them. There are three separate layers of plastic here. Two of them are covered in electrically
conducting metal tracks and there's an insulating layer between them with holes in it. The dots you can see are
places where the keys press the two conducting layers together. The lines are electrical connections that allow
tiny electric currents to flow when the layers are pressed tightly together.

How touchscreens work

Different kinds of touchscreen work in different ways. Some can sense only
one finger at a time and get extremely confused if you try to press in two
places at once. Others can easily detect and distinguish more than one key
press at once. These are some of the main technologies:
Resistive
Resistive touchscreens (currently the most popular technology) work a bit like
"transparent keyboards" overlaid on top of the screen. There's a flexible upper
layer of conducting polyester plastic bonded to a rigid lower layer of
conducting glass and separated by an insulating membrane. When you press
on the screen, you force the polyester to touch the glass and complete a
circuitjust like pressing the key on a keyboard. A chip inside the screen
figures out the coordinates of the place you touched.

When you press a resistive touchscreen, you push two conducting layers together so they make contact, a bit
like an ordinary computer keyboard.

Capacitive
These screens are made from multiple layers of glass. The inner layer
conducts electricity and so does the outer layer, so effectively the screen
behaves like two electrical conductors separated by an insulatorin other
words, a capacitor. When you bring your finger up to the screen, you alter the
electrical field by a certain amount that varies according to where your hand
is. Capacitive screens can be touched in more than one place at once. Unlike
most other types of touchscreen, they don't work if you touch them with a
plastic stylus (because the plastic is an insulator and stops your hand from
affecting the electric field).

In a capacitive touchscreen, the whole screen is like a capacitor. When you bring your finger up close, you
affect the electric field that exists between the inner and outer glass.

Infrared
Just like the magic eye beams in an intruder alarm, an infrared touchscreen
uses a grid pattern of LEDsand light-detector photocells arranged on opposite
sides of the screen. The LEDs shine infrared light in front of the screena bit
like an invisible spider's web. If you touch the screen at a certain point, you
interrupt two or more beams. A microchip inside the screen can calculate
where you touched by seeing which beams you interrupted. The touchscreen
on Sony Reader ebooks (like the one pictured in our top photo) works this
way. Since you're interrupting a beam, infrared screens work just as well
whether you use your finger or a stylus.

An infrared touchscreen uses the same magic-eye technology that Tom Cruise had to dodge in the movie
Mission Impossible. When your fingers move up close, they break invisible beams that pass over the surface of
the screen between LEDs on one side and photocells on the other.

Surface Acoustic Wave

Surprisingly, this touchscreen technology detects your fingers
using sound instead of light. Ultrasonicsound waves (too high pitched for
humans to hear) are generated at the edges of the screen and reflected back
and forth across its surface. When you touch the screen, you interrupt the
sound beams and absorb some of their energy. The screen's microchip
controller figures out from this where exactly you touched the screen.

A surface-acoustic wave screen is a bit like an infrared screen, but your finger interrupts high-frequency sound
beams rippling over the surface instead of invisible light beams.

Near field imaging

Have you noticed how an old-style radio can buzz and whistle if you move
your hand toward it? That's because your body affects the electromagnetic
field that incoming radio waves create in and around theantenna. The closer
you get, the more effect you have. Near field imaging (NFI) touchscreens work
a similar way. As you move your finger up close, you change the electric field
on the glass screen, which instantly registers your touch. Much more robust
than some of the other technologies, NFI screens are suitable for rough-andtough environments (like military use). Unlike most of the other technologies,
they can also detect touches from pens, styluses, or hands wearing gloves.

With a near-field imaging screen, small voltages are applied at the corners, producing an electric field on the
surface. Your finger alters the field as it approaches.

Light pens
Light pens were an early form of touchscreen technology, but they worked in a
completely different way to modern touchscreens. In old-style computer
screens, the picture was drawn by an electron beam that scanned back and
forth, just like in a cathode-ray tube television. The pen contained
aphotoelectric cell that detected the electron beam as it passed by, sending a
signal to the computer down a cable. Since the computer knew exactly where
the electron beam was at any moment, it could figure out where the pen was
pointing. Light pens could be used either to select menu items or text from the
screen (similar to a mouse) or, as shown in the picture here, to draw computer
graphics.

Drawing on a screen with a light pen back in 1973. Although you can't see it from this photo, the light pen is
actually connected to the computer by a long electric cable. Photo by courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center
(NASA-ARC).

Advantages of touchscreens

The great thing about touchscreen technology is that it's incredibly easy for
people to use. Touchscreens can display just as much information (and just as
many touch buttons) as people need to complete a particular task and no
more, leading people through quite a complex process in a very simple,
systematic way. That's why touchscreen technology has proved perfect for
public information kiosks, ticket machines at railroad stations, electronic voting
machines, self-service grocery checkouts, military computers, and many
similar applications where computers with screens and keyboards would be
too troublesome to use.
Photo: Touchscreens are widely used in outdoor applications, such as ticket machines at railroad stations.
They're popular with customers, since you can often buy your train ticket more quickly without waiting in line.
They're also good news for the station operator, since machines like this work out cheaper than paying a human
sales person.

Some of us are lucky enough to own the latest touch phones, which have
multi-touch screens. The big advantage here is that the display can show you
a screen geared to exactly what you're trying to do with it. If you want to make
a phone call, it can display the ordinary digits 09 so you can dial. If you want
to send an SMS text message, it can display a keyboard (in alphabetical order
or typewriter-style QWERTY order, if you prefer). If you want to play games,
the display can change yet again. Touchscreen displays like this are incredibly
versatile: minute by minute, they change to meet your expectations.

So far, most of us have had fairly limited exposure to touchscreen computers,

but all that seems certain to change as ever more people go online with
mobile devices (cellphones and tablet computers such as iPhones and iPads).
Back in 2008, Microsoftanounced that touch technologies would feature
prominently in future versions of the Windows operating systempotentially
making computer mice and keyboards obsoletebut it will take time for most
of us to shift away from old computers and operating systems, and the old
ways of using them. Though it could be a while before we're all prodding and
poking our computers into action, touchscreen technology is definitely
something we'll be seeing more of in future!
Who invented touchscreens?

Automobiles, airplanes, computers, and steam enginestouchscreens belong

in the company of these illustrious inventions because they lack a unique
inventor and a definitive, "Eureka" moment of invention: in other words, no
single man or woman invented the touchscreen.
The first invention that bears any kind of resemblance to using a modern
touchscreen was called a light pen (featured in the photo up above), a stylus
with a photocell in one end, and a wire running into the computer at the other
end, that could draw graphics on a screen. It was developed in the early 1950s
and formed a part of one of the first computer systems to feature
graphics, Project Whirlwind. Light pens didn't really work like modern
touchscreens, however, because there was nothing special about the screen
itself: all the clever stuff happened inside the pen and the computer it was
wired up to.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, another key strand in the development of
touchscreens came from the work of computer scientists who specialized in a
field called human-computer interaction (HCI), which sought to bridge the gap
between people and computers. Among them were Douglas Engelbart,
inventor of the computer mouse; Ivan Sutherland, a pioneer of computer
graphics and virtual reality; and Alan Kay, a colleague of Sutherland's who
helped to pioneer the graphical user interface (or GUIthe picture-based
desktop used on virtually all modern computers).
The first gadget that worked in any way like a modern touchscreen was called
a "Discriminating Contact Sensor," and it was patented on October 7, 1975 by
George S. Hurst and William C. Colwell of Elographics, Inc. Much like a
modern resistive touchscreen, it was a device with two electrically conducting
contact layers separated by an insulating layer that you could press together
with a pen. Crucially, it was designed to be operated "with a writing instrument
[the patent drawings show a pen] and not by any portion of a writer's hand".
So it wasn't like a modern, finger-operated touchscreen device. (See US
patent #3,911,215 for more details.)
Many people think touchscreens only arrived when Steve Jobs unveiled
Apple's iPhone in 2007but touch-operated, handheld computers had already
been around for 20 years by then. One of the first was the Linus Write-Top, a
large tablet computer released in 1987. Five years later, Apple released the
ancestor of its iPhone in the shape of Newton, a handheld computer

manufactured by the Japanese Sharp Corporation. Operated by a pen-like

stylus, it featured pioneering but somewhat erratic handwriting recognition but
was never a commercial success. Touchscreen input and handwriting
recognition also featured in the Palm series of PDAs (personal digital
assistants), which were hugely popular in the mid-1990s.
From iPhones and iPads to ebooks and tablets, all modern touchscreen
gadgets owe something to these pioneering inventors and their scribbling
machines!