An analysis of electrode patterns in capacitive touch screen panels

In the design of capacitive touch-screen panels, electrodes are patterned to improve touch sensitivity. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between electrode patterns and touch sensitivity. An approach is presented where simulations are used to measure the sensitivity of touch-screen panels based on capacitance changes for various electrode patterns. Touch sensitivity increases when the touch object is positioned in close proximity to fringing electric fields generated by the patterned electrodes. Three new electrode patterns are proposed to maximize field fringing in order to increase touch sensitivity by purely electrode patterning means. Simulations showed an increased touch sensitivity of up to 5.4%, as compared with the more conventional interlocking diamonds pattern. Here, we also report empirical findings for fabricated touch-screen panels. © 2005-2012 IEEE.

Flexible array sensors based on zinc oxide nanowires for touch displays

Recent efforts towards the fabrication of touch sensing systems are presented, in which zinc oxide nanowire arrays are embedded in a polymer matrix to produce an engineered composite material. In the future, these sensor systems will be fully flexible and multi-touch as intended for Nokia's 'Morph' concept device.

High-performance nanowire oxide photo-thin film transistor.

A gate-modulated nanowire oxide photosensor is fabricated by electron-beam lithography and conventional dry etch processing.. The device characteristics are good, including endurance of up to 10(6) test cycles, and gate-pulse excitation is used to remove persistent photoconductivity. The viability of nanowire oxide phototransistors for high speed and high resolution applications is demonstrated, thus potentially expanding the scope of exploitation of touch-free interactive displays.

Auto-calibration of a camera system using Image Alignment

Calibration of a camera system is a necessary step in any stereo metric process. It correlates all cameras to a common coordinate system by measuring the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera. Currently, manual calibration of a camera system is the only way to achieve calibration in civil engineering operations that require stereo metric processes (photogrammetry, videogrammetry, vision based asset tracking, etc). This type of calibration however is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, in civil engineering operations, camera systems are exposed to open, busy sites. In these conditions, the position of presumably stationary cameras can easily be changed due to external factors such as wind, vibrations or due to an unintentional push/touch from personnel on site. In such cases manual calibration must be repeated. In order to address this issue, several self-calibration algorithms have been proposed. These algorithms use Projective Geometry, Absolute Conic and Kruppa Equations and variations of these to produce processes that achieve calibration. However, most of these methods do not consider all constraints of a camera system such as camera intrinsic constraints, scene constraints, camera motion or varying camera intrinsic properties. This paper presents a novel method that takes all constraints into consideration to auto-calibrate cameras using an image alignment algorithm originally meant for vision based tracking. In this method, image frames are taken from cameras. These frames are used to calculate the fundamental matrix that gives epipolar constraints. Intrinsic and extrinsic properties of cameras are acquired from this calculation. Test results are presented in this paper with recommendations for further improvement.

Electrotactile touch surface by using transparent graphene

In this work we present a flexible Electrostatic Tactile (ET) surface/display realized by using new emerging material graphene. The graphene is transparent conductor which successfully replaces previous solution based on indium-thin oxide (ITO) and delivers more reliable solution for flexible and bendable displays. The electrostatic tactile surface is capable of delivering programmable, location specific tactile textures. The ET device has an area of 25 cm 2, and consists of 130 μm thin optically transparent (>76%) and mechanically flexible structure overlaid unobtrusively on top of a display. The ET system exploits electro vibration phenomena to enable on-demand control of the frictional force between the user's fingertip and the device surface. The ET device is integrated through a controller on a mobile display platform to generate fully programmable range of stimulating signals. The ET haptic feedback is formed in accordance with the visual information displayed underneath, with the magnitude and pattern of the frictional force correlated with both the images and the coordinates of the actual touch in real time forming virtual textures on the display surface (haptic virtual silhouette). To quantify rate of change in friction force we performed a dynamic friction coefficient measurement with a system involving an artificial finger mimicking the actual touch. During operation, the dynamic friction between the ET surface and an artificial finger stimulation increases by 26% when the load is 0.8 N and by 24% when the load is 1 N. © 2012 ACM.

Extreme sensitivity of graphene photoconductivity to environmental gases.

Graphene is a single layer of covalently bonded carbon atoms, which was discovered only 8 years ago and yet has already attracted intense research and commercial interest. Initial research focused on its remarkable electronic properties, such as the observation of massless Dirac fermions and the half-integer quantum Hall effect. Now graphene is finding application in touch-screen displays, as channels in high-frequency transistors and in graphene-based integrated circuits. The potential for using the unique properties of graphene in terahertz-frequency electronics is particularly exciting; however, initial experiments probing the terahertz-frequency response of graphene are only just emerging. Here we show that the photoconductivity of graphene at terahertz frequencies is dramatically altered by the adsorption of atmospheric gases, such as nitrogen and oxygen. Furthermore, we observe the signature of terahertz stimulated emission from gas-adsorbed graphene. Our findings highlight the importance of environmental conditions on the design and fabrication of high-speed, graphene-based devices.