Article by andersDX appearing on enterprisefeatures.com
Applications such as tablets and smartphones have popularized the use of the touch screen to such an extent that it has become the default, expected interface for many other consumer devices. What’s more, the ease-of-use and ubiquity of touch screen designs in consumer products is having a knock-on effect when it comes to expectations for user interfaces in industrial equipment, medical products and a host of other non-consumer designs. And for designers looking to deliver the optimum user experience by unlocking the power of touch-based control the future is, undoubtedly, multi touch.
andersDX has partnered with Nuiteq, one of the world’s premiere multitouch SW companies, to offer their award winning Snowflake Software suite across their market leading range of multitouch display hardware.
Snowflake is a market proven, plug & play multi-touch application suite with over 30, easy to customise applications which provide innovative ways to present products, services and other content, using intuitive and impressive gestures to display and interact with images, videos, web sites, brochures etc.
If you’re seeking evidence on how touch screen interfaces increase customer spend then look no further than this story about the world-famous New York City yellow taxi drivers using touch screens to increase customer tips by over $140 million dollars a year!
Back in 2007 it seems the cabbies were less than impressed by the city forcing them to take credit cards, but they have since found that the credit card readers they have had to install have increased average tips from 10% to 22%.
The latest addition to the andersDX family of embedded display platforms, and the first to feature a multi-touch PCAP display, the DX4 streamlines the path to iPad-like user experience for non-consumer electronic devices.
During his visit to last month’s Display Week exhibition Rob Anders, the CEO of andersDX was a little disappointed by how little innovation he found in terms of user experience.
The annual Society for Information Displays (SID) Display Week International Symposium and Exhibition is the premier annual showcase for an industry that, according to SID, is valued at just over $100 billion annually. This year’s event, which took place at the start of June, had over 250 exhibitors and saw more than 6500 attendees flock to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Massachusetts. I was one of those visitors and this year, for the first time I left with less of a sense of awe and more of a sense of disappointment.
As regular readers of this Blog will know multi touch is close to our heart, which is why we were very interested to find out about a multi touch proximity-aware tabletop collaboration between Autodesk Research, the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto.
Known as Medusa, the tabletop is composed of a Microsoft surface device and 138 infrared proximity sensors. These sensors are arranged in three rings: an outward facing ring around the perimeter of the base and two rings on the top of the table facing upwards from the bezel.
Further evidence of the amazing growth in use of touch screens comes in a recent report into the rapidly expanding market for touch controller ICs.
According to market research firm IHS iSuppli, 2.4 billion touch controller ICs will be shipped in 2015, a staggering 277% increase on the 865 million shipped in 2010. And the same report suggests that 1.7 billion units will be shipped in 2012, a 28% jump over 2011.
Viewing angle is generally defined as the maximum angle at which a display can be viewed with ‘acceptable visual performance’ – for example without losing significant brightness or experiencing significant colour shifts. In some cases small viewing angles are acceptable and, indeed, desirable – think about a laptop PC where the user doesn’t want others to be able to easily see the screen.