The success of the iPhone has triggered the adoption of touchscreen systems in a wide range of mobile devices, and a bevy of new gadgets equipped with capacitive sensing technology have now hit the market.  MOTO has years of experience developing products that use capacitive touch, and we’ve had the opportunity to test many of the latest devices. Our conclusion: All touchscreens are not created equal.

It takes finesse to create a touchscreen system that’s pleasant to use, because touchscreens require seamless integration between hardware components, software algorithms, and user-interface design. If a manufacturer cuts corners or flubs any of the critical elements, the user’s experience with a touchscreen product is likely to suffer.

Simple and True

Although we usually use sophisticated tools to test touch screen accuracy, MOTO has also developed a simple technique anyone can use to evaluate the resolution and accuracy of a touchscreen device. All you need is a basic drawing program (download one if necessary), a steady hand, and a few straight lines drawn very slowly on the screen.

This video shows what happened when we recently took several touchscreen systems out for a test drive:

The Virtue of Slow

Why do you need to draw slowly?  On a good touchscreen, users can draw clean straight lines, even while going very slowly, so the graphics that appear on screen accurately represent what was physically drawn.

On inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.

Pressure Matters

Also, even on a single device, the amount of pressure and the part of the finger you use on the screen has an impact on how well it senses. A good touchscreen device will produce linear output regardless of whether you’re using the full pad of your finger, or just the dry corner of your cuticle.  When comparing devices, make sure to use even pressure across all of them.

If you want to show the most extreme case, draw very lightly with the corner of your finger. The artifacts will increase significantly, showing which device is really the best with a weak signal. This is important because quick keyboard use and light flicks on the screen really push the limits of the touch panel’s ability to sense.

Here you can see the results of our test:

Edge Performance

Take careful note of the performance at the edges of the screen. The performance at the edge is challenging to tune, and separate from the basic “waviness” test. The iPhone tracks all curve very strongly as you approach the edge of the screen, despite a straight finger trajectory. This is especially obvious at the bottom, where the iPhone has a sensitivity problem.

The Droid Eris [Nexus One] is actually the clear winner for edge performance — the signal tracks right off the edge of the screen very consistently.

[edit] As of time of first writing, we hadn’t tested the Nexus One.  It does slightly better than the Eris.  In fact, they both use the same touch controller IC.

A Quest for High Signal-to-Noise Ratio

To create a superior touchscreen experience, it’s essential to develop a touchscreen sensor that has the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR. When a manufacturer gets it right, the device tracks touch inputs almost as if they were connected to physical objects in the real world. Get it wrong and consumers end up with inferior touchscreen systems that are inaccurate, insensitive, and absolutely infuriating to use for typing.

Key drivers of SNR include:

• Conductive sensor material
• Substrate material
• Substrate thickness
• Distance from display (the biggest noise source)
• Sensing waveform
• Sensor pattern
• Sensor pitch
• Analog sensing circuitry
• Sample rate

Touchscreens are a catalyst for innovation and a powerful way for device manufacturers to differentiate their products in an intensely competitive marketplace. But as our demonstration shows, there’s a right way and a wrong way to deploy the technology. MOTO has worked with capacitive touch interfaces for more than 15 years, and here are some essential dos and don’ts for anyone entering the field:

• Don’t skimp on materials. With touchscreen hardware, manufacturers get what they pay for — and consumers will notice the difference.
• Allow ample time to develop your algorithms. Don’t treat touchscreen algorithms as an element of component sourcing; for best results, create a distinct touch development track under your own roof to make sure your products are both responsive and accurate.
• Closely integrate touchscreen hardware, software, and user interaction development, and do so as early as possible in the product development process. Never treat them as separate tasks.

In 2007, MOTO developed a prototype of a Multi-Touch Table– a large-scale, resisitive-touch system that enables multiple users to  conduct simultaneous touch-based interactions in a unified content environment. Since then, we’ve been eager to develop applications that exploit the unique capabilities of the Multi-Touch Table, and recently created a new one: casino-style Blackjack.

Gaming is an ideal application for multi-touch screen technology. Replacing physical tokens, chips, cards, or game pieces with virtual items eliminates tedious setup, distribution, and cleanup tasks while increasing the efficiency and accuracy of gameplay.

And unlike many other real-world computing tasks, games have well-established norms and behaviors that are straightforward to translate into multi-touch gestures and interactions; players still feel that they “own” their cards, pieces, or money. Meanwhile, team-oriented play is actually easier in a virtual gamespace, because players can collaborate and share cards without having to physically pass them back-and-forth.

Showing Our Hand

With all that in mind, MOTO developed a full-scale version of Blackjack for this multi-touch screen. Written in Java, using an open source graphics library called Processing (for images of playing cards, chips, card rotations, and animation), Multi-Touch Blackjack recreates a casino-style game experience on a touch-screen tabletop, giving a familiar game new verve. Watch our video to see what we mean:

Multi-Touch Blackjack from MOTO Development Group.

From a design perspective, the key challenge was to develop gestures that feel natural and intuitive. Fortunately, Multi-Touch Blackjack also knows what players may want to do based on where they are in the action, so it automates some aspects of the game that might otherwise require non-intuitive actions.

When you have a hand of cards, for example, it assumes you probably want to hide them.

In the multi-touch environment, the basic elements of blackjack gameplay are re-created using familiar gestures and interactions:

Dealing: The dealer simply slides virtual cards across the table (or the task can be automated).

Private viewing: Players can shield their cards from other players by creating a cupped barrier with one hand. This gesture hides the face of the cards behind an opaque “curtain.” To view cards privately, the player slides their cupped hand slowly down the virtual cards. As the hand moves, the opaque curtain rises to reveal a small portion of the cards.

Betting: Bets are placed by dragging virtual chips into the center of the table.

Showing: Players reveal their cards by raising the cupped hand that shields them. (This behavior can be restricted so users cannot show their cards accidentally.)

Next Stop, Vegas

Transforming slot machines into social tables that can transition from individual games to social interactions and back to group games likely holds too much promise for Vegas not to innovate in this direction.  How could Vegas resist the potential for more decorative and flexible gaming surfaces?

It’s easy to go one simple step further and envision casinos adding RFID readers to these tables, enabling loyalty card usage and a bevy of targeted marketing opportunities.  Users could place drink orders, pay for food, buy tickets to the show their neighbor just talked up.

There may be human learning curves and security concerns to wrestle, but our experience with forthcoming larger-scale, high quality touch sensing technologies suggests that fun, social, multi-touch casino gaming is around the bend.

Links

A New York Times article summarizes the state of multi- touch.

Devices such as the iPhone have begun to scratch the surface of gesture-based software interfaces, yet large, true multi-touch interfaces are still rare, bulky, and expensive.

This recent prototype – a next iteration of labs’ Sensing Screen – promises effortless touch interaction, full multi-touch, a robust glass work surface, low stack height, with comparatively moderate cost.  It does not utilize cameras or projection technology.   This means that in production, this scalable technology could be very thin and very big.  It could sit on legs like any table, or lay on a wall surface like any LCD panel.

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Please scroll down to watch the video.

This table is a departure from earlier examples because it is relatively easy to use by non-technical content creators. It works in most lighting because it doesn’t use a camera. It is market quality, and does not require tuning on location.

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A new type of interface that can sense and identify objects without touching the screen, and allows multiple simultaneous interactions with on-screen graphics. This innovation has many applications.