Physics at your fingertipsHow touchscreens are transforming communication and commerce

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• Developed by CERN as a result of physics research and development.

• Touchscreens are enabling new and innovative services and business models.

• Physics-based technologies have the potential to radically transform business ventures and social activities.

Touchscreens in smartphones have quickly become a part of everyday life, sustaining a market in the UK worth billions of pounds. But this is not the whole story. Touchscreens are also integral to a wide range of business sectors across the UK and Irish economies. Providing quick and intuitive interfaces, touchscreens are now a part of everything from buying train tickets to keeping up-to-date medical records.

The idea of the modern touchscreen dates back to 1965 when E A Johnson, working at the Royal Radar Establishment based in Malvern, published his ideas on a “novel input/output device for computers”. His intended use for the concept was in air-traffic control: Johnson proposed a system where the air-traffic controller could touch pictures on a screen that would navigate them between menus showing details of each aircraft in the area. However, Johnson’s device was not widely used and it took until 1973 before two CERN physicists, Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe, were able to manufacture a working screen. At the time, the Super Proton Synchrotron, the predecessor to today’s Large Hadron Collider, was nearing completion and required complex settings and controls, rendering its control room cumbersome and costly. Beck and Stumpe devised a system where all aspects could be controlled from only six touchscreens, through displays and menus navigable by touch alone.

Both the Johnson and Beck/Stumpe screens were what are termed “capacitive” touchscreens – the kind used in today’s iPhones and customer interface screens, but it took further physics-based technology developments to unleash the potential of touchcreens. “Touchscreens were originally integrated with cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, the same as old TV screens, and so they weren’t flat,” explains Michal Diakowski, from U-Touch, a UK-based touchscreen manufacturer. This cumbersome design resulted in a lack of accuracy in knowing where the screen had been touched – a problem that disappeared with the development of flat and less bulky plasma screens and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), themselves the products of decades of physics research.

Touchscreens are now found everywhere from the classroom to the boardroom. In 2004 the UK government gave British schools £50 m to install interactive whiteboards and more than 90% of schools now use them. “The possibilities of ‘smartboard’ interaction blends well with our use of hands-on models to keep students involved in the learning process and gives them the ability to approach topics in their own way,” explains Brendan Owens, Astronomy Programmes Assistant at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where 25,000 schoolchildren complete education visits each year.

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In 2004 the UK government gave British schools £50 m to install interactive whiteboards

“The global touchscreen manufacturing market is expected to reach $4.4 bn in 2012, compared with $2.4 bn in 2006,” explains Diakowski. “Touchscreens are also becoming increasingly common in meeting rooms, boardrooms and classrooms,” notes Diakowski, whose company specialises in manufacturing larger touchscreen displays.

“The demand for large-format touchscreens is about to kick in,” Diakowski says, as people begin to wake to the benefits of large touchscreens for business meetings and collaborative working. “You can interact with, and annotate over, your PowerPoint presentations,” he points out. “Imagine a 200 inch screen that has software to allow many people to work on it at the same time. That’s the kind of project that we are already working on for a control centre at a Kuwaiti oil company.”

According to the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), the UK beer and pub sector provides 950,000 jobs and is worth £19.4 m to the UK economy. Touchscreen technology has become an integral part of their business. Touchscreen tills have long enabled faster and more efficient service to customers. As the recession hit in 2009, any way to increase profits became crucial, and pub chain J D Wetherspoon, one of the UK’s largest, describes touchscreen quiz machines as “an important part of the overall success of the company’s individual pubs”. “There is no going back,” added a spokesperson, “touchscreen quiz machines are extremely popular, which is good for the customer and good for our pubs.”

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how touchscreens work

Since the notion was first proposed, there have been many different “touchscreen” technologies developed, ranging from those that require physical pressure to push together two layers in the screen to complete a circuit, to screens that have beams of light projected across their surface to detect when something, e.g. a finger, obstructs them. The screens used in many modern products, including

smartphones and supermarket checkouts, are “capacitive screens”, a technology developed at CERN. These screens generate an electric field that senses the presence, and position, of a conducting medium – a user’s finger or a metal stylus, but not an insulating wooden cocktail stick. These screens allow greater precision, and sharper detection than other technologies.

Touchscreen tills have long enabled faster and more efficient service to customers

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Self-service touchscreens are also finding their way into hospitals. University Hospital, of North Staffordshire NHS Trust, one of the UK’s largest NHS trusts responsible for around half a million potential patients, is just one example. On arrival, patients have the option of checking themselves in on a touchscreen. “The advantage is that the patient is checking their own demographics. It eliminates the need for a receptionist to read out potentially confidential information,” says Stephen Casbolt, a project manager with the trust. “Touchscreens are also an advantage from an infection control point of view,” he adds. The screens are disinfected every half an hour, which would be more difficult to do with a keyboard. Touchscreens are also used in the hospital’s theatres to keep a record of the patient’s progress. “The benefit is that we can identify and measure what we are doing. Getting measurable data allows us to compare our performance with our peers,” Casbolt explains.

Modern touchscreens are the result of Nobel prize-winning basic research, a multinational particle physics experiment and 30 years’ physics research and development (R&D) in the UK and around the world. Today, they are found in almost every home in the UK and are driving innovation and wealth generation everywhere from pubs to corporate boardrooms. New discoveries are driving the technology ever further forward, and UK physics is taking the lead.

Modern touchscreens are the result of Nobel prize-winning basic research

Front cover image courtesy of iStockphoto.com Prepared by Colin Stuart August 2012This publication was produced by IOP using sustainably sourced materials.

The future

Novel materials are set to change the way that touchscreens are used. One such example is graphene, a sheet of carbon only one atom thick, that was first isolated at the University of Manchester by physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (for which they won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics). This single layer of atoms has extraordinary properties – stronger than steel and a better electrical conductor than silver – and may become the material of choice for all touchscreens over the next decade. Samsung in Korea has already demonstrated small-scale displays and new models could be flexible or even wearable screens.

Gesture-driven interface technologies based on high-resolution detectors and mathematical modelling initially found success in the computer games market, with the Microsoft KinectTM system, and this has rapidly been expanded to home fitness programmes. In the future, such technologies will find their way into shops and other businesses. Touch-free interfaces that allow fast and hygienic stations would have obvious advantages in places such as hospitals and surgical theatres but also in fresh-food departments, or even fashion: Topshop in Moscow has recently trialled a Kinect-based augmented reality system that allows shoppers to see themselves on a screen wearing their potential purchases without the need to try anything on.