Deciding on the right touch technology can be challenging for even the seasoned technology guru. With over 1200 touch-related patents in existence, it is easy to become confused about which touch technology to choose to integrate into a new product.

Whether it is the credit card terminal at the grocery store, the ticket kiosk at the local interactive white boards movie theater or the mobile phone in your pocket, the use of touch is making its way into virtually every environment and is here to stay. It may be augmented by motion and voice, but until we develop a direct telepathic link to the machine, touch will be present.

When choosing a touch screen, it’s important to first carefully evaluate the needs of your product and the environment of the display. Once your key requirements have been identified, it’s easier to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each technology to find the infrared touch frame screen that’s right for your application.

As the name implies, multi-touch refers to the ability to simultaneously register more than one touch at one time. One common multi-touch feature is the ability to use gestures. The most common gestures are the same features that you’ll find on your smart phone or tablet: pinch, expand, and rotate. When using multi-touch, a driver is written to recognize specific gesturing functions and relay them to the software to act upon.

There is a bit of a debate within the infrared interactive whiteboard touch community about redefining the term multi-touch. For a system to be classified as multi-touch, the coordinates must be absolute, meaning that there must be two or more specific coordinates. All of the technologies covered here, excluding surface capacitive and analog resistive, are capable of doing gestures (this is controller dependent); however gestures don’t require true multi-touch capabilities, as they can rely on ghosting. Ghosting occurs when a replica of the transmitted image, offset in position, is super-imposed on top of the main image. The most commonly used multi-touch capable technologies are projected capacitive, multi-touch analog resistive and optical touch.

Until the recent introduction of gestures, touch was introduced whenever it was found that it could complete a task 3X faster than using a keyboard (point of sale terminal in a restaurant), or where the device could instruct the casual user on a complicated device (medical instrument), or where pen input for writing was needed (PDA). Gestures have added the first new use for touch in several years.