Live from the Emerging Display Technologies Conference

By Bayle Emlein

Notes from the Emerging Display Technologies Conference
Santa Clara, CA

Dr. Jennifer Colegrove opened the conference by listing the kinds of input technologies. She noted that by 2018, the touch display market is projected to grow to $31 billion by 2018. New input and screen technologies will overtake capacitive and IR input and the current layered screen technologies. She outlined current market choices and technologies  projected  for the immediate future. 

Jeff Han, founder and chief scientist at Perceptive Pixel--which has just been acquired by Microsoft--noted the rapid evolution of touch technologies in the 21st Century. He does not feel that he needs to define multi-touch to this audience. This was a concept that he could barely explain  a decade ago. The next step is to create solutions and technologies to get real world done and that are reliable enough to trust when engaging in mission-critical operations. Or just when people who are relatively technologically naive are presenting live on national television. The human interface--finger fatness and gesture imprecision--limit the effectiveness of current input strategies. New integrated solutions will solve the problems. Jeff thinks that touch plus pen is the next technology and that collaboration is the next killer app.  

The Future of MultiSensing
Douglas Young, VP General Manager America, Neonode Inc. pointed out that gestures work better than touch on small screens. Neonode  patented gesture technology in 2002. Multi-sensing includes Pressure, proximity, hovering, 3-D, etc. Once touch processing is moved from an external processor to the application processor, cost, latency, and power consumption  problems are greatly reduced. For example, a mobile phone with a 1000 mAh battery will have 2,000 hours standby hours.  Input device--finger, stylus, pen, paint brush, etc.--are becoming increasingly transparent.