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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.
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.
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.
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.
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