Slashdot Mirror
Thin Film Transforms Any Surface Into Touchscreen
kkleiner writes "Open up a cardboard tube, roll out a transparent film just millimeters thick, apply it on a flat object and *tada* you've got an interactive touch surface. Cambridge-based Visual Planet just launched its new massive-sized multitouch thin film drivers so you can create touchscreens from 30 to 167 inches in size! Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer capable of sensing the touch of a finger, or even pressure from wind and translating that to a computer interface. It works on glass, wood, and other non-conductive surfaces."
I am so sick of that thin film touchscreen on glass (or other non conductive material) technology we have now
I would imagine any film above 1mm in thickness would be pretty hard to roll up into anything resembling a reasonable diameter.
don't you think that's rather thick?
Call me back when you can roll it out on a non-flat girl's back, play a video game for a half hour or an hour, and have her believe you just gave her a massage...
I have waited for that life altering experience for so long..
Put it on women's bras for the ultimate "touchscreen interface".
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Oh, no! Gone with the wind!
Fandroids hate facts.
just give me a cheap cost like say $20 to turn my 24 inch monitor into a touchscreen with a bog standard usb power connector which emulates a usb mouse and i'll buy one. oh wait ? they cant ? it costs thousands of dollars for these at reasonable sizes ? touch screen monitors are cheaper ? too bad. next!
If this is reasonably affordable I'll stop looking for a development machine with a touch interface and just buy this for my hdtv.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer
You what? Sounds like someone went a bit OTT with the copy and pasting of big words.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Laminate this onto tabletops and make the entire boardroom table a surface for spying.
Can you see this being applied to computer smartphones and tablets to create the ultimate sharing/hacker tool. If they can build one with OCR or image caputure (see Saturn's Race by Larry Niven as an example of what I'm talking about), nobody's safe any anymore.
When can we use that as a skin for robotic humanoids?
You cannot transform anything into a touchscreen, if it's not a screen!
You insensitive clod!!!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Someone's going to come along and complain "ugh, resistive? If it's not capacitive it's crap!" any time now...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Porn will never be the same!
Touch me here.
They were great out on the shop floor. Some of the mechanics were in the habit of using (pointy, sharp) tools to tap touch screens. So anything that could be peeled off and replaced without having to scrap an entire CRT was great. Yeah, CRT. Get over it, kid. And get off my lawn!
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm just a simple rural engineer, but round these parts we tend to use "thin" to imply something of negligible thickness, not several milla-meters like you fancy city folk.
It will be obscenely expensive...
I have been trying to get something in the reasonable price range to make a 42" touchscreen for a while now. all of it is in anal raping price ranges.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This looks like a great component for lots of hobby projects if it is cheap enough for the purpose. If I could get a single touch that I could make an Arduino interface for at less than $30 I can think of a dozen one-of projects right now. Great science / maker faire signs, wall art, board games, etc.. At $300 they won't sell many. Anyone know the price?
sounds like it would make great robot skin
Fortunately.. pretty much any physical object is a screen. Some are better at it than others, to be sure.
Without some sort of screen/display underneath, how will you know where the 'buttons'/areas are that you want to touch? Unless those buttons/controls are static and constant, in which case physical buttons/switches are probably a better solution.
And just how transparent is this film? I'd love nothing more than to turn my 42" plasma panel in my living room into a touch panel (just for coolness factor if nothing else) but will I still be able to enjoy watching movies with this film stuck to my TV? Unless they can make this thing completely transparent, its not actually as useful as it might first seem.
It annoys me that people think HDTV is good. In fact as far as DPI resolution goes, they're pretty much in the suckage range. My 5-6 year old Dell laptop has a 1920x1200 resolution 17" monitor.
... and btw: How do you sit two TVs next to each other. Really, what developer only uses one monitor nowadays?
This appears to simply be an input device that is rolled out over an existing screen. Kind of neat, but not exactly worldchanging, and quite far from "transforming ANY surface into a touchscreen device". It might be able to record inputs, but the user would get no feedback without a screen or something like that.
If this was a DISPLAY that thin, then this would be groundbreaking.
Now what's really good about my hdtv is that I already own it. Is dpi everything? No, i have an n900 woth a 3.5" display at 800x600, is that going to be iseful for development?
What annoys me are people who can't read then go on rants and just assume people have money to spend, did you miss that part as well? It's seems the only thing you saw was hdtv and then you just mentally vomitted.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
N900's 800x480, actually...
Thyat being said, I *do* use it for development, at least tweaking bits of code on the fly with VIM.
But I, for one, would *love* a 200-dpi(N900 is ~230, regular monitor ~100), 20' or so monitor, because it would mean you could use anti-alised fonts and such without it looking blurry and odd. It'd also reduce the need for AA in games, though the total number of rendered pixels would make up for that.
Posted from my N900. :P
what i would relove are lisp bindings for android on my tablet.I haven't been able to get anything done since my laptop died.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Their "multitouch" product goes up to 60" diagonal, and supports two simultaneous finger touches.
Not exactly the same as a MS Surface or NUI experience.
Apply to large square of plastic.
Add small micro-controller, a couple of switches, and some minor programming.
Sell as "DanceDance DoorLock".
Profit!!!
Stick this transparent thin film on an ATM keypad and you won't need a camera anymore. Covering your fingers as you type in your pin is not going to help either.
once you go 2560x1440 or up, dual screen seems like a band-aid which we had to use because High definition screen were/are still expensive. I for one rejoice when I don't see 2 wasteful borders in my most precious view angle. Let's not even get started with vertical space.
I saw something similar demonstrated at CeBit in 2008. It was made by a Chinese company, and they applied it to a bunch of HDTVs on the scene, and let us operated it minutes after applying it (using Vista's tablet features).
Perhaps they didn't use nanotechnology, but it worked fine, so who cares what the underlying tech is?
And it was certainly not "milimeters" thick. More like 1/4 of a milimeter.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Now that Microsoft is trying to turn PCs into smart phones, everyone's going to need this to retrofit their monitors to make the UI usable, since it's completely unusable with a mouse and KB.
I wonder how can you display, say, your favorite holiday pictures on a cardboard box and then have it the touch stuff to zoom that in and out ... ... the real glassy ones I mean.
Or how can you do the same on a window
No, you can only transform screens (in the sense of "device to display pictures and text") into touchscreens.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Does this work on any surface? I guess it would have to be a solid based surface , not a projector screen where you can actually foucs in and out the image, and change the x and y position by doing so?
Those who touch the screen and leave fingerprints all over it, and those of us who break those people's fingers.
mark "that's why there are keyboards!"
Well, it's a two-step process, and here they are only describing step 2.
Other folks are indeed working on step 1, though.
Neat, indeed!
There's also step no.3 to have anything transmitting on GSM/3G and step no.4 to make anything an iPhone.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.