Developing and Specifying Touch Interfaces
August 13, 2012, Display Search Emerging Display Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Michelle Jones from TouchInternational described the process to develop and specify touch interfaces. This applies to users who plan to use fairly small numbers of units, in the 10-100k range.
New touch developers need to identify the unique characteristics and requirements of their design. If they are making a discrete layer design, the designer has to understand the design constraints and needs, and be able to define all critical parameters. In addition, the requirement of all aspects of the controller and how to integrate the controller into the rest of the system, need definition.
Of equal importance are the special requirements needed by some industries, such as environmental sealing and/or weatherproofing. The application requirements may not be compatible with some technologies. It helps to get expert advice at the beginning of a design to address all of the different design tradeoff considerations.
The basic design process and flow can raise questions for those not familiar with designs at this level. The choice of technologies and the design of the user interface, along with the intended user experience may require some prototyping or direct customer interactions with the design group, to find the difficulties and ensure a good user experience.
The technology choice also has to consider the roadmaps for the displays, controllers, and touch interfaces. Not understanding the different development and evolution cycles of the disparate technologies can lead to difficulties down the road, when a particular technology or components may no longer be available.
These design considerations are important for anyone looking into developing a touch-enabled display. Many domain expertise areas may be unfamiliar to the designer, and omissions and errors are much harder to correct than a subsystem on a PCB. Integrating the software into a fully functioning system is harder if some components are not working properly or used in their preferred operating mode.
