Touch Screen Technologies John Broz, Ted Dimiropolous, Alex Schallmo, Mahreen Younus With the advent of the

I-Phone, touch screen technology has reached the mainstream. Every call carrier now offers their own version of touch phones and there have been rumors of completely touch-interfaced computers. While touch screen technology has been around since the 1960s, the media buzz has taken off in the past two to three years. Touch screen monitors have become more and more commonplace since their prices have dropped in the past decade. Touch screens are found in ATMs, PDAs, cellular phones, grocery checkout counters, airport check-in counters, and many other devices that we use every day. Simply put, a touch screen is a display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. The term generally refers to touch or contact to the display of the device by a finger or hand. Touch screens provide an alternative user-interface to the historical mouse and keyboard of traditional computers. Touch screens first became a research interest in the second half of the 1960s. In 1971 Samuel Hurst developed the first touch sensor. One of the first places where they gained some visibility was in a computer-assisted learning terminal that came out in 1972 as part of the PLATO project. This was the first step in commercializing touch screen technologies. Touch screens became widely used in kiosk and point of sale systems in banks and stores. In 1983, the first touch screen computer, the HP-150, reached the market. Since then we have seen the introduction of advanced touch screen technologies leading to the commercialization of tablet PCs, PDAs, and touch-screen phones. There are several different types of touch screen technology. The resistive system is based on the use of two parallel conductive and resistive metallic layers. The capacitive system uses a monitor with a built up charge on its surface. When a person touches the surface, the charge is transmitted to the user, thus allowing the computer to recognize the touch. A third technology is the surface acoustic wave. This recognizes touch by using transducers that can analyze at what instance a wave was disturbed. In our presentation, we will touch on the history behind touch screen technology while also explaining in detail how the different methods of touch screen technologies work. More specifically, we will spend a considerable amount of time describing the different technologies found in devices that use touch screen. We will also delve into the current commercial applications and practical benefits of touch screens. Finally, we will comment on the future applications and potentials of touch screen technology.