As touch-mania swipes across all markets, many applications look to upgrade to multitouch but can't afford the high price of capacitive touchscreens. Now automobiles, appliances, medical devices, and low-end smartphones can retrofit multitouch gestures to resistive-touchscreen designs, or create inexpensive alternatives to capacitive touchscreen products, by merely upgrading their controller-chips to Freescale Semiconductor Inc.'s new Ready-Play solution. The new Xtrinsic smart controller provides multitouch gesture recognition for any standard four- or five-wire resistive touchscreen and handles up to four capacitive touchpads.
"As tablets become more popular, the capacitive touchscreen business has been growing by over $200 million" per year, "but the resistive touchscreen market has been growing at almost the same rate," said John Weil, global business manager for industrial MCU solutions at Freescale. "Adding a resistive touchscreen is a quick and inexpensive way to enrich existing and new applications in medical, consumer, automotive, and other markets."
Capacitive touchscreens get all the glamour, since they are used on tablets, but markets for both resistive and capacitive touchscreens grew by at least 20 percent in 2011.
Source: IHS iSuppli.
Using proprietary algorithms, and some analog hardware tricks, the new Xtrinsic CRTouch chip provides on-chip state-machines that can recognize slides, two-finger pinches for zooming in and out, as well as multifinger rotations on standard resistive touchscreens. The controller chip also manages up to four capacitive touchpads for realizing keypads, rotary dials, and linear sliders.
As users get more and more comfortable with the touch screen paradigm via increased use of smart phones and tablets, it definitely ups the ante for deployment of the same interface technology on other kinds of platforms. This seems like a good alternative to help defray some of the high costs of touch screen technology so manufacturers can stay with the times without having to pass on the expense to customers. I'm assuming there are or will be other alternatives with the same value proposition.
Freescale does it again. I have some experience with the Xtrinsic line (accelerometer). This is definately a game changer. As touch screens become more widely deployed, the cost of the screens becomes a driving cost factor. With MS Windows 8 supportig touch screens, there will be a move to support touch screens on a PC platform without increasing the cost significantly to compete with tablets.
This is definitely a game changing moev from Freescale. This will really boost not only consumer domains but also medical domain as this will improve workflow. Freescale is really doing wonders.
"Touch mania," as author Colin Johnson characterizes it, is indeed the order of the day. I can't tell you how much interest I've seen in HMI and touch-panel interfaces of all sorts at all the automation shows I went to in 2011.
Glad to see this technology taking shape. I remember when I first introduced touch as the operator interface at my former company - a manufacturer of off-road industrial vehicles. Half the place said that it would never be accepted. Then, as soon as it was introduced, people started clamoring for this type of technology.
Jack, now that touch is being accepted and widely deployed, it'll be interesting to see how quickly voice (recognition) will evolve. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would've said it isn't even on the radar. Now, with Apple's Siri, which I believe is based on Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition technology, we see that voice is actually consumer-ready. So this means it will move into the business arena shortly, too. The scary thing with speech, though (aside from the technical challenges of background noise), is that you actually DON'T want in-plant speech recognition technology to be too responsive. You want to authenticate the user (not that you do that with touch-- their presence on the plant floor and/or access to the HMI panel is their authentication). I guess what I mean is, you don't want to voice recognizer to do stuff when a command isn't really intended. Like when someone says "I was so tired last nite, with I got home I went to sleep," you don't want it putting some industrial computer in sleep mode.
You've got a point there, Alex, with the problem of the machine "overhearing" a conversation not meant for it. Do you know how that is addressed with Siri? Do you have to touch a button first to get it's attention or do you address it directly? I can see it now: To friend: "Seriously, I'm not going to call my boss and tell him..." PHONE: "Calling Boss...."
Many iPhone owners seem to like to play games with Siri, like suggesting what it can go do with itself and seeing how it responds. I'm guessing the second-gen Siri will be more innovative as far as how it replies to queries it doesn't "understand."
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