The Future of Touch Screen

The Future of Touch Screen.Nowadays, people are busy with their own business and activities, and some of them can be such a waste of time. The development of technology answers them by creating new innovations: TOUCHSCREEN. It first began as simple and weird panel in 1971 in Sam Hurst's workbench, University of Kentucky.

Touch screen, touch panel or completely touchscreen panel is a computer input device which works when its surfaces being touched by a finger or a pen. Touchscreen interface, in which users operate the computer system by touching pictures and texts it's own screen, is the easiest way to use a computer by now, and now there are many computer and phone devices manufacturer already decided to mount the touchscreen interface system into their products. Moreover, it is a must for software programmers and developers to build a software that will compatible with this invention, considering many people now are using the touchscreen technology.

Touchscreen firstly intended to be used in manufacture industry because of its accuracy, touch sensitivity, and high durability. But now touchscreen devices can be found everywhere around our lives, and its planted in almost every mass-production high technology, newest gadgets like notebooks, laptop computers, tablet computers, music players, cellphones, even in the future, can be seen on the floor, up the wall, blinking tables, and bleeping windows. This "crazy" matter here, can be done because the touch panel can be made in various size and thickness.

Touchscreen are a common in many public places, such like the information kiosk in the stations and ports. Some touchscreen system are available as monitor with built-in touch sensor capability and already have high-sensitivity. But some of them comes as touchscreen kit, which are more cheap and effective, planted on a simple common monitor without built-in sensor on it. In this case, the touchscreen act twice, as input device and so as output device.

Touchscreen sensor components consist as follows:

 1. touchscreen sensor panel, located on the outer part of the interface, generates some kind of electrical jumps based where it detects any touches.

2. touchscreen controller, processes the signal received from sensor panel, transcribe them into touch data and sends them to the central processor.

3. driver and software, translates touch data into input data (just like mouse), enabling the sensor panel to work as a "mouse", and serves the user interface application.

Pfauth and Priest (1981) describe the benefit and side effects of touchscreen panel, as follows:

Positive effect
Direct control between the user's eyes and user's touches (the panel as input and screen as output, so it serves as input and output)
Faster capability to insert command and watch over them.
Simple using and don't need any training manual
Displays only valid and possible options.
Easy and user friendly
The user(s) don't need to memorize much of their actions (because it's faster!)

Negative effects
Expensive (at that time, it was so difficult to develop new inventions)
It takes more time to develop program to be compatible with
Less flexible on some input actions
Malfunction of user interface can lead to error commands
The exhausted feeling because the user always need to see the screen (mind the radiations ;))
While used, fingers may cover the screen.
New software and drivers needed to support the panel.

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