Hasta La Gadget!

Turning your monitor into a touchscreen could some day be as simple as peel … and stick.

Displax, a Portugal-based company, promises to turn any surface — flat or curved — into a touch-sensitive display. The company has created a thinner-than-paper polymer film that can be stuck on glass, plastic or wood to turn it into an interactive input device.

“It is extremely powerful, precise and versatile,” says Miguel Fonseca, chief business officer at Displax. “You can use our film with on top of anything including E Ink, OLED and LCD displays.”

Human-computer interaction that goes beyond keyboards and mouse has become a hot new area of emerging technology. Since Apple popularized the swipe and pinch gestures with the iPhone, touch has become a new frontier in the way we interact with our devices.

In the past, students have shown a touchscreen where pop-up buttons and keypads can dynamically appear and disappear. That allows the user to experience the physical feel of buttons on a touchscreen. In 2008, Microsoft offered Surface, a multitouch product that allows users to manipulate information using gesture recognition.

Displax’s films range from 3 inches to 120 inches diagonally.

“If Displax can do this for larger displays, it will really be one of the first companies to do what we call massive multitouch,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who focuses on multitouch and gestural computing. “If you look at existing commercial technology for large touch displays, they use infrared camera that can sense only two to four points of contact. Displax takes us to the next step.”

Displax’ latest technology works on both opaque and transparent surfaces. The films have a 98 percent transparency — a measure of the amount of light that is reflected through the surface. “That’s a pretty decent transmission rate,” says Wigdor.

A grid of nanowires are embedded in the thin polymer film that is just about 100 microns thick. A microcontroller processes the multiple input signals it receives from the grid. A finger or two placed on the screen causes an electrical disturbance. The microcontroller analyzes this to decode the location of each input on that grid. The film comes with its own firmware, driver — which connect via a USB connection — and a control panel for user calibration and settings.

Currently, it can detect up to 16 fingers on a 50-inch screen. And the projective capacitance technology that Displax uses is similar to that seen on the iPhone, so the responsiveness of the touch surface is great, says Fonseca.

And if feeling around the screen isn’t enough, Displax allows users to interact with the screen by blowing on it. Displax says the technology can also be applied to standard LCD screens.

Displax’s versatility could make it valuable for a new generation of displays that are powering devices such as e-readers. For instance, at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, Pixel Qi showed low-power displays that can switch between an active color LCD mode and an e-reader-like, low-power black-and-white mode. Pixel Qi’s displays, along with other emerging display technologies from the likes of Qualcomm’s Mirasol  and E Ink’s color screen are keenly awaited in new products because they promise to offer a good e-reader and a netbook in a single device.

But touch is a feature that is missing in these emerging displays. Displax could help solve that problem.

It is also more versatile than Microsoft Surface, says Fonseca. “Our film is about 100 microns thick, while Surface is about 23 inches deep,” he says. “So we can slip into any hardware. Surface cannot be used with LCD screens so that can be a big limiting factor.”

The comparisons to Surface may not be entirely fair, says Wigdor. “Surface is not just another hardware solution,” he says. “It includes integrated software applications and vision technology so it can respond to just the shape of the object.”

Still he says, Displax’s thin film offers a big breakthrough for display manufacturers because it they don’t have to make changes to their manufacturing process to use it. Displax says the first screens featuring its multitouch technology will start shipping in July.

Photo: Displax

See Also:

• Touchscreen PCs Prompt Interface Innovations
• Experimental Touchscreen Has Physical Buttons That Can Pop Up
  
• Dell Joins ‘Kitchen PC’ Trend With Touchscreen Desktop
• To Answer the Phone, Scratch Your Jeans
• Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote
  

Google’s Nexus One phone has gained kudos for its vivid OLED screen and slim design. But the lack of multitouch support for its gorgeous display has left some users frustrated.

Now there’s a hack for it. A developer has modified the Android 2.1 operating system running on the Nexus One to enable multitouch for the device. Though it enables the feature for the Nexus One browser, for now, it is likely to soon become a part of other applications, such as maps.

Earlier this month, Google launched Nexus One as the first smartphone that would be sold by the search company itself, rather than a manufacturing or carrier partner. The Nexus One is designed by HTC and is currently available on T-Mobile’s network for $180 with a two-year contract with T-Mobile. An unsubsidized version of the phone costs $530.

But the lack of multitouch on the Nexus One has left many users puzzled. Nexus One has a touchscreen but users can only tap on it with one finger. So none of the two-finger pinch-and-zoom gestures that are popular among iPhone users are available. Google has said it will consider adding the feature in future updates.

The Android community, though, isn’t holding its breath. Steve Kondik, a developer who goes under the nickname Cyanogen, has offered a few files and instructions on code to add multitouch to the device.

“You will initially lose your bookmarks and browser settings by doing this,” he warns.  Hacking the phone could also void its warranty.

But as this video shows, getting multitouch in the Nexus One browser could just be worth it.

Photo: pittaya/Flickr

[via PC World]

See Also:

• Google Nexus One Leaves Customers Sour
• Google Nexus One Phone Likely to Launch Jan. 5
• Rumor: Google Nexus One $530 Unlocked, $180 With Plan
• Google Debuts Android-Powered Nexus One ‘Superphone’
• Google Nexus One Sales Off to Slow Start

LAS VEGAS — Everybody is showing off new e-readers at CES this year, and Samsung is no exception. But there is one reason for you to keep reading this post. With Samsung’s e-book, you can write on the pages.

We knew e-books would be a hot item at this year’s show, but the surprise is that there are so many large format readers. Samsung’s small range tops out with a 10-incher, which joins the Kindle DX in its new international clothing, and Plastic Logic’s enormous 8.5 x 11-inch Que proReader.

Samsung’s e-books, the E6 and E101, look just like any other black and white e-ink device. When you’re done reading either of the 6- or 10-inch books, though, you can pull out a stylus and start scrawling. These sticks come in various thicknesses and use “electromagnetic resonance” to draw lines on the page.

The smaller readers also have secret, slide-out controls hidden behind the screen, and an on-screen, soft QWERTY lets you type real text — your stylus scribblings remain just that, and are not automagically transformed into actual text. Still, its a lot easier to jot notes on top of your pages than to do it the Kindle way and tortuously tap out text on the chiclet keyboard.

The readers grab content over Wi-Fi (no 3G) and can display PDF, ePub and plain text files. I played with them briefly at Samsung’s stand (”No pictures, sir. It’s our policy this year.”) and took some pictures. The e-ink screen is much the same as any other, but when using the stylus to navigate, the local refreshing that draws menus is cleaner (but no quicker) than, say, the Kindle.

The navigation itself is clunky, and you never know whether you should be pressing an actual button, touching the stylus to the screen or using a finger (hint: fingers don’t work). Drawing, though, is responsive, and just like using a real pencil.

The e-readers need some work, and feel like the prototypes they are. Hopefully, there will be some additional polish before these go to market, otherwise it will be yet another rushed product hoping to grab some sales from the flawed leader, the Kindle. Also, a quick question to the visitor at the Samsung stand who asked, “Just what is the main difference between this and the iPod Touch?” Are you serious?

$400 or $700, depending on size. And don’t say “Magna-doodle.” The pictured prototype with a hardware keyboard does not yet have a price.

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• Video Boxes, 'Notbooks' and E-Books to Dominate Gadgets in 2010 …
• Amazon Kindle DX International: Too Late?

Samsung Unveils Its First E-Book for Reading, Writing and Sharing On-The-Go [Samsung]

Shiny, quilt-look phones are an admittedly limited market — but considering that Samsung announces on average 17.2 quadzillion phones a week, it makes perfect sense that they’d devote a whole line to this kind of over-the-top foolishness. We spent a couple minutes with the S5150 flip and S7070 touch phones today — the first two members of the Diva series — marveling at just how truly frilly these trinkets are. The gilded S5150, in particular, dazzles the eyes with a concealed LED display (yes, LED, not LCD) and an amazing sheen that could probably be used as a defensive weapon to blind an attacker in a pinch. In terms of UI and functionality, you’re not going to find anything new here — but then again, that’s not really what a Diva’s about, is it? Follow the break for a quick, totally bedazzled look at the S5150’s flashy dress.

Continue reading Samsung’s Diva S5150 and S7070 delight, blind

Samsung’s Diva S5150 and S7070 delight, blind originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Touchscreens have become a big hit among cellphone users. But what’s next after tap to click and the two-finger pinch and zoom?

Synaptics’ Fuse experimental phone shows a device that you can interact with by squeezing, gripping, flexing and tilting the phone. The device melds multiple technologies such as multi-touch capacitive sensing, haptic feedback, 3-D graphics and proximity sensing.

“It’s not a product but a prototype that showcases a lot of key input technologies,” says Robyn Palmer, marketing specialist for Synaptics. “Our focus was on how to make mobile phones mobile again.”

Fuse tackles the difficulty of single-handed usage and the need to constantly look at the screen, two big challenges that users face today with current generation touchscreen devices, says Synaptics.

With Fuse, touch sensors at the back of the phone means users can poke it to receive or initiate calls. Force and capacitive touch sensors on the sides of the phone also allow you to squeeze the phone to select icons from the phone’s menu. Incorporating the accelerometers into the user interface also means you can tilt the phone to scroll and grip the phone tight to stop.

Synaptics’ silent video demos some of these ideas.

Fuse uses Synaptics multi-touch touchscreen, capacitive scroll strips, a Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 processor, three accelerometers, force sensors on the sides of the phone, a 480 x 800 high-resolution AMOLED display and a 3.7-inch screen.

The phone–which was created in partnership with Texas Instruments, Immersion and U.K. design firm The Alloy, among others–won’t make it to market as a product. But Synaptics plans to license parts of it to handset makers that are looking to take user interface on mobile phones to the next level.

The Fuse concept phone will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show  in Las Vegas next month.

Photo: Fuse/Synaptics