While touch-sensitive frames have been around for years, their size and responsiveness has been limited. A new prototype called ZeroTouch has been developed at Texas A&M University’s Interface Ecology Lab, and creates more possibilities for interaction beyond typical interfaces like glass touch-screens on smartphones and laptops.

The 28-inch ZeroTouch frame with scalloped edges can detect whatever moves around inside it. Fingertips, hands, arms, and inanimate objects pass through an invisible two-dimensional optical web that tracks them. When placed on a computer screen, ZeroTouch turns into an interactive surface that can be manipulated with a stylus. Around the frame’s four edges are an array of infrared LED lights, the invisible beams of which shine into and across the inside open area. Mixed in with those lights are 256 modulated infrared sensors, which register the beams of the lights located across from them. ZeroTouch simply requires the user to break the light beams; there’s no force required to activate the sensor.

When a user places one or more fingers or other objects within the frame, the system’s software is able to calculate the size, shape and location of those objects within the frame, and apply that to equivalents on a Windows 7 computer screen. The research prototype was made using commercially available sensors usually found in TV remote controls, so the frame prototype only cost about $450 to construct. Aside from improving device interaction, the ZeroTouch could potentially be used as a training guide for surgeons, as the device could track fine hand movements. Additionally, it could provide interactive instructions on how to construct complicated machinery. ZeroTouch was presented at last week’s 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver.

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Does the thought of removing your gloves to answer a call or send an important message from your touchscreen smartphone in the dead cold winter make you shiver? Perhaps you’ve opted for a stylus and are getting tired of its lack of accuracy?

Clearly, everybody who uses a Smartphone would prefer a capacitive touchscreen over the resistive alternative, as capacitive touchscreens offer much better precision and feedback and the uptake from the capacitive touchsceen divulges its superiority over the other.

However, until recently, the perfect touchscreen that would accept input from a gloved finger as well as a stylus, and be responsive as today’s capacitive screens was a white whale of the cell phone industry, a thing to be dealt with in the future! The capacitive touchscreens currently lack the compatibility with using an input device other than finger.

Hitachi has brought that future in the present, though.  At this year’s IFD International conference, Hitachi displayed to the world that it has overcome the problem on their new capacitive touchscreen display by adding a controller chip that detects input from non-conducting items and turns it into capacitance. The end result: an all-purpose display that receives input from any object, which is destined to be popular with phone and tablet manufacturers.

With the versatile touchscreen that accepts input from any device, Hitachi is the first company to have made such a huge breakthrough in the mobile world, which could address the U. S. and European markets; as well as the Asian markets, where handwriting recognition and stylus input are required by many.

Hitachi unfortunately won’t be marketing the device until the end of 2011, so until then, grab your conductive finger-tip gloves from Fivepoint.

SOURCE: Diginfo.tv

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Unfortunately, tech-nerds all over the internet were critical of this approach and demanded a more controlled data set. In other words don’t use their stubby, Cheeto-dust covered fingers. So back to the drawing board, the Moto guys wrote a special script for their trusty laboratory robot and then re-ran the comparison to see how the touchscreens stack up when the lines are drawn by a robot’s slow and precise “finger.”

After the Moto robot mechanically groped the phones for a few hours, the team had their results…not much difference from the high-tech “finger” test. The iPhone is still the champ! Being an iPhone user myself, this was fairly obvious from the few times I’ve had to borrow a friends phone to make a call. It’s generally a ghetto version of the real deal. But now you don’t have to take my word for it.

Look at the results below:

Comparison Chart of Robotic Touchscreen finger test

In the long run, however, Moto says they don’t expect the high degree of touchscreen variation between handset manufacturers to continue for long because capacitive touchscreens are a relatively new technology to appear in consumer electronics products. Factually, the screens in current phones, besides the iPhone, are all last-generation silicon and touch panel components.

Moto closes by saying:  “the other touch screen makers are hard at work perfecting their new solutions, and they may just leapfrog Apple in some areas when they arrive on the market over the next year.”

…but I doubt it.

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