Mobile Touch Screens could soon Feel the Pressure

By Duncan Graham-Rowe


Forget swiping or pinching - the next generation of portable touch-screen devices will be able to distinguish between a gentle touch and a hard poke.

Peratech, a UK company, has signed a $1.4 million deal to license its pressure-sensing touch-screen technology to Japanese screen manufacturer Nissha, which makes displays for companies including LG and Nintendo. Peratech's technology is one of several approaches that can be packed into portable devices. But it uses a novel quantum mechanism to sense pressure, and this promises to be more sensitive and more efficient than the other approaches.

Peratech, which was spun out of a research lab at Durham University in 1996, uses an electrically conductive material dubbed a quantum tunneling composite (QTC). Quantum tunneling occurs when electrons jump between two conductors that are brought close together, but remain separated by an insulating barrier. In Peratech's switches, a polymer acts as the insulating layer. It is embedded with spiky, conductive metallic particles, each about 10 nanometers in size.

Patrick Olivier, a human-computer interaction and computer graphics expert at Newcastle University, in the UK, says that pressure sensing has largely been limited to large screens with cameras mounted behind them. An example is Microsoft's tabletop system, called Surface. This approach works by using a technique called frustrated total internal reflection, where the camera detects light from within the screen itself as it is refracted by a finger that makes contact with the screen.

Gadgets that use the technology should hit the market as early as April of this year, says Taysom. These devices could bring with them new interactive functionality. "The harder you press, the faster the screen will scroll or the faster a character will run in a game," says Taysom. This could also make it easier to drag and drop on-screen items, or to perform two tasks at the same time, such as simultaneously dragging and zooming an image, Taysom says.

Associated Link: More: Mobile Touch Screens Could Soon Feel the Pressure

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