Scientists Working to Develop Next-Gen Touchscreen

Touchscreen technology has come a long ways over the years. In fact, the technology didn’t even exist just a few decades ago. But in that short amount of time, tech companies have pioneered the use of fully functional touchscreen interfaces, most of which revolve around resistive or capacitive touch technology. However, scientists are already working on a new generation of touchscreen technology that could one day replace current specifications.

Researchers from the University of Sussex in the UK are working on a new touchscreen technology that produces small patterns using liquid-crystal display (LCD) illumination. As you may already know, touchscreen devices on the market today currently feature either LED or LCD backlights. If you inspect the interface closely, you’ll see a grid of vertical and horizontal pixels. The general idea behind this next-gen touchscreen technology is to shrink the pixel size so they are significantly smaller than current standards; thus, enhancing the definition of LCD displays for touchscreen devices.

Touchscreen devices sold today typically use electrodes made of indium tin oxide. The next-gen technology, developed by researchers from the University of Sussex and led by Professor Alan Dalton, however, will likely use a different material, such as silver nonwire films to mimic the characteristics and properties of its ITO counterpart.

The silver nanonwires mimic the same transmittances and conductivity properties of ITM films, making it an attractive alternative for use in touchscreen devices. But this is the first time the material has been used in such applications, so there’s still more work needed to be done.

“Display technologies such as LCD and OLED form images using pixels. Each pixel of these displays is further broken down into subpixels; typically, one each for red, green and blue colours,” said the project’s lead researcher. “In the display in a smartphone, for example, these subpixels are less than a sixth of the width of a human hair – which is also similar in length to the silver nanowires used in our research,” he said. “In this research we have applied a mathematical technique to work out the smallest subpixel size we can make without affecting the properties of our nanowire electrodes.”

Unfortunately, there’s still word yet on when this technology will be released? Being that it’s still in the early stages of development, it could be months or years.

What do you think of this next-gen touchscreen technology?