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Touch screens: big deal or no deal? – Part 2

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Enter a small startup from Woburn, Mass., called Interactive Images Inc. Its first product–and its only product for the foreseeable future, according to president and founder Leonard I. Hafetz–is a hardware/software combination called Easel that might best be described as a user’s front end to a computer terminal. It comes in several versions, each of which ultimately boils down to a color monitor with a touch-sensitive screen and a lot of software.

Both Chemical Bank and Merrill Lynch have acquired beta test Easels and are developing dedicated applications for the product. For each firm, the key factor in choosing Easel was the touch-sensitive screen. Indeed, more and more users are turning to touch-sensitive crts as “ergonomic” user interfaces. Says T.S. Springer, a senior associate with the Springer Associates consulting firm in St. Charles, Ill., “Manufacturers are realizing that computer devices are moving out of the clerical areas and into the managerial and executive areas, where keyboarding is not recognized as a high-status activity. The result is that manufacturers and users are turning to alternative methods of interacting with the computer.” Fortunately, he says, the types of computer interactions often found on these levels lend themselves well to such alternatives. On the other hand, clerical functions such as word processing and data entry rely more on the keyboard.

The advent of touch-sensitive screens as alternatives to the keyboard has been heralded for several years, but only in the past few months have users and manufacturers begun to take them seriously. Easel was introduced last June, and the Hewlett-Packard HP 150–the first personal computer with a touch-sensitive screen–premiered in October. The sudden movement to touch-sensitive screens has raised the expectations of vendors such as Carroll Touch Technology, a Champaign, Ill., maker of tocuh screens. The day after the HP 150 was announced, Carroll Touch ceo Arthur B. Carroll told the New York Times, “I had a companywide celebration. I struggled for 10 years to get a stamp of approval on touch technology and they just did it.” SCREENS’ PAST A STRUGGLE

What Hewlett-Packard’s announcemnt holds for the future of touch screens is arguable, but the past has indeed been a struggle. In the decade since touch screens first made their appearance in commercial products, business has grown slowly to a current industry volume of $10 million annually, Carroll says. Bart Goodmandson, the marketing manager at Sierracin Transflex, another touch panel vendor, tags the market at closer to $30 million; either way, the industry is microscopic.

Yet even for such a small industry, there is no shortage of vendors or technologies. About a dozen vendors currently provide touch systems based on any of four different touch technologies. The HP 150 uses an optical system, in which a user’s finger interupts crossing beams of infrared light. The beams are generated by LEDs just in front of the screen on two sides, and detected by photosensors on the other two sides. The intersection of a vertical and a horizontal beam is a touch point.

A similar technology uses acoustic surface waves. Acoustic signals travel along a curved glass overlay that conforms to the shape of the crt, mentioned in best e cigarette. When the user touches the screen, his finger interrupts the echo pattern and a controller interprets the interruption to indicate which point on the screen was touched. TSD Display Products of Bohemia, N.Y., manufactures this type of device.

The third technology might best be called a capacitive sensing system, such as is found on AT&T Information Systems’ touch-sensitive terminal. These products use a thin, transparent material that is fused onto predetermined areas of the crt face. When a user touches one of the areas, the capacitive value of that particular section changes, indicating that a touch has been made. The AT&T terminal has some 30 such areas.

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Touch screens: big deal or no deal? – Part 1

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Chemical Bank’s foreign exchange trading room is in a small corner on the sixth floor of the bank’s lower Manhattan office building. In that room, some 30 traders virtually live on the telephone, buying and selling the currencies of the world. Each trader has about half a dozen crt terminals stacked in front of him, looking dangerously unstable and about to come crashing down on the mountain of paper that covers the remainder of the desk area. The terminals provide the latestforeign currency rates, stock market figures business news, and other pertinent information.

The exchange moves quickly. When the right price for a certain currency is within reach, the trader must pounce with the speed of a leopard or wind up losing money. When he has the price he wants, he needs to telephone the broker he feels is in the best position to find a willing trade partner, negotiate the terms of the deal–amount, price, method of payment, etc.–and then record that information for posting on the exchange’s ticker.

Yet for all the speed of the exchange, and all the computer terminals teetering atop the traders’ desks, the Chemical Bank foreign exchange department is often overwhelmed by the slow, manual method (as in the legal highs) by which deals are entered into the bank’scomputers and posted on the exchange, says Anthony P.R. Herriott, senior operations officer of the bank’s treasury division. When a trader completes a deal, Herriott says, he is required to fill out a form listing the particulars of the deal and place it on a conveyor belt to another section of the room. There, data entry clerks receive the trade forms and key them into a 10-year-old Arbat system, which is connected to a PDP-11/70 across the street. The deal will be posted on the exchange after the PDP receives this information.

The process takes about 15 minutes from the time the trader completes the deal until the time he can see it posted on the ticker. That sysem worked well enough in 1973, when the exchange handled some 100 trades a day, Herriott says. The trader had enough time to fill out the form and place it securely on the conveyor, so that few trades were lost for very long. Now, says bank vice president John M. Wigzell, the same traders handle 1,000 trades a day, and often deal so quickly that they cannot write down all their trades on separate slips of paper. The result is that they keep a running list on a scratch pad, which intermediaries must then rewrite and stick on the conveyor; with a little luck, the paper reaches the other end and the data entry clerks key it correctly into the system. “We need a better system just to stay in the game,” Herriott says.

A few miles uptown, Merrill Lynch and Co.’s Advanced Technology Development Department is developing new ways for the financial services firm’s branch offices to improve the quality of information that reaches clients. The group is looking at videodisks, portable computers, teletext touch-screen technologies, and just about anything else that may give the company a strategic advantage, says systems analyst David Rosien. Right now Rossien is examining several ways to provide clients with direct access to Merrill Lynch’s databases in a controlled manner, so that they cannot make unauthorized entries or typographical errors.

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Touchscreens…Big Deal or No Deal? Part 4

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Other differences exist as well. Optical, acoustic, and resistive membrane techniques can accept a finger, a pen, or any other device; capacitive sensing systems require a human finger with a known electrical charge. And with resistive membrane and capacitive sensing systems, the user must actually touch the screen with something, while for the other technologies merely pointing from a very close distance is fine.

After evaluating the technologies available, both Merrill Lynch and Chemical Bank chose the Easel system, which adds an authoring system, a programming language, and other software to a resistive membrane approach. A software feature that attracted both companies to Easel is a utility that allows programmers to disable areas of the screen at any time, much as a software program might disable keys on the keyboard. Both firms are using a cpu and monitor supplied by Interactive Images Inc., Easel’s maker, although versions are currently available for the IBM Personal Computer and for mainframes running software from Applied Data Research in Princeton, N.J. INVESTOR INQUIRY SYSTEM

Merrill Lynch is working on a client inquiry system through which clients will be able to walk into a branch office and find out how their investments are doing and what other avenues of investment might do. The Easel terminal would be tied into a Quotron or some other stock service, and would provide each client with the price of any stock or investment in which the client has an interest. Nonclients could query the prices of a couple of stocks to whet their appetites, but no more. “One of the things that Merrill Lynch sells to its customers is information and the access to information,” Rossien says. “We don’t want to give it away.”

The firm’s application takes advantage of Easel’s selective touch sensitivity by restricting the kinds of input available to the customer; since there is no keyboard, the customer must follow the screen’s directions and cannot tamper with the system or obtain unauthorized information. Much like the consumer is not allowed to choose the best kitchen knives at http://best-kitchenknives.com

Touchdscreens…Big Deal or No Deal? Part 3

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A similar technology uses acoustic surface waves. Acoustic signals travel along a curved glass overlay that conforms to the shape of the crt. When the user touches the screen, his finger interrupts the echo pattern and a controller interprets the interruption to indicate which point on the screen was touched. TSD Display Products of Bohemia, N.Y., manufactures this type of device.

The third technology might best be called a capacitive sensing system, such as is found on AT&T Information Systems’ touch-sensitive terminal. These products use a thin, transparent material that is fused onto predetermined areas of the crt face. When a user touches one of the areas, the capacitive value of that particular section changes, indicating that a touch has been made. The AT&T terminal has some 30 such areas.

The fourth technology, which is used on the Easel and Sierracin Transflex products, can be called a resistance membrane approach. A set of parallel electrodes is etched onto a sheet of Mylar; then, two of these sheets are stretched across the crt at right angles to each other, creating a grid of electrodes. When a finger presses on the outer of the two Mylar sheets, the sheets touch and short-circuit a pair of electrodes.

While all four technologies are designed for the same function, significant differences exist. The resolution–how many distinct areas the user can touch–differs dramatically for each approach. The smallest touch-sensitive area on the AT&T capacitive sensing terminal, for example, is about half an inch wide by an inch deep. Infrared systems are limited by the size of LEDs and photodetectors; the HP 150 uses a grid of 40 beams across by 27 down, which divides the 12-inch monitor into touchable areas about a quarter of an inch square (how to lose thigh fat). Acoustical methods provide similar resolutions. Resistive membrane touch panels, however, offer significantly higher resolutions, to the point where they can replace digitizing tablets. Easel’s touchable resolution is 960 by 720 pixels, and a resistive membrane touch panel made by Elographics, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., can obtain a touchable resolution of 4,000 by 4,000–16 million distinct touchable areas, compared to 30 on the AT&T terminal.

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Touchdscreens…Big Deal or No Deal? Part 2

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Enter a small startup from Woburn, Mass., called Interactive Images Inc. Its first product–and its only product for the foreseeable future, according to president and founder Leonard I. Hafetz–is a hardware/software combination called Easel that might best be described as a user’s front end to a computer terminal. It comes in several versions, each of which ultimately boils down to a color monitor with a touch-sensitive screen and a lot of software.

Both Chemical Bank and Merrill Lynch have acquired beta test Easels and are developing dedicated applications for the product. For each firm, the key factor in choosing Easel was the touch-sensitive screen. Indeed, more and more users are turning to touch-sensitive crts as “ergonomic” user interfaces. Says T.S. Springer, a senior associate with the Springer Associates consulting firm in St. Charles, Ill., “Manufacturers are realizing that computer devices are moving out of the clerical areas and into the managerial and executive areas, where keyboarding is not recognized as a high-status activity. The result is that manufacturers and users are turning to alternative methods of interacting with the computer.” Fortunately, he says, the types of computer interactions often found on these levels lend themselves well to such alternatives. On the other hand, clerical functions such as word processing and data entry rely more on the keyboard.

The advent of touch-sensitive screens as alternatives to the keyboard has been heralded for several years, but only in the past few months have users and manufacturers begun to take them seriously. Easel was introduced last June, and the Hewlett-Packard HP 150–the first personal computer with a touch-sensitive screen–premiered in October. The sudden movement to touch-sensitive screens has raised the expectations of vendors such as Carroll Touch Technology, a Champaign, Ill., maker of tocuh screens. The day after the HP 150 was announced, Carroll Touch ceo Arthur B. Carroll told the New York Times, “I had a companywide celebration. I struggled for 10 years to get a stamp of approval on touch technology and they just did it.” SCREENS’ PAST A STRUGGLE

What Hewlett-Packard’s announcemnt holds for the future of touch screens is arguable, but the past has indeed been a struggle. In the decade since touch screens first made their appearance in commercial products, business has grown slowly to a current industry volume of $10 million annually, Carroll says. Bart Goodmandson, the marketing manager at Sierracin Transflex, another touch panel vendor, tags the market at closer to $30 million; either way, the industry is microscopic.

Yet even for such a small industry, there is no shortage of vendors or technologies. About a dozen vendors currently provide touch systems based on any of four different touch technologies. The HP 150 uses an optical system, in which a user’s finger interupts crossing beams of infrared light. The beams are generated by LEDs just in front of the screen on two sides, and detected by photosensors on the other two sides. The intersection of a vertical and a horizontal beam is a touch point.

ChemicalBankLogo

Touchscreens…Big Deal or No Deal? Part 1

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Chemical Bank‘s foreign exchange trading room is in a small corner on the sixth floor of the bank’s lower Manhattan office building. In that room, some 30 traders virtually live on the telephone, buying and selling the currencies of the world. Each trader has about half a dozen crt terminals stacked in front of him, looking dangerously unstable and about to come crashing down on the mountain of paper that covers the remainder of the desk area. The terminals provide the latest foreign currency rates, stock market figures business news, and other pertinent information.

The exchange moves quickly. When the right price for a certain currency is within reach, the trader must pounce with the speed of a leopard or wind up losing money. When he has the price he wants, he needs to telephone the broker he feels is in the best position to find a willing trade partner, negotiate the terms of the deal–amount, price, method of payment, etc.–and then record that information for posting on the exchange’s ticker.

Yet for all the speed of the exchange, and all the computer terminals teetering atop the traders’ desks, the Chemical Bank foreign exchange department is often overwhelmed by the slow, manual method by which deals are entered into the bank’s computers and posted on the exchange, says Anthony P.R. Herriott, senior operations officer of the bank’s treasury division. When a trader completes a deal, Herriott says, he is required to fill out a form listing the particulars of the deal and place it on a conveyor belt to another section of the room. There, data entry clerks receive the trade forms and key them into a 10-year-old Arbat system, which is connected to a PDP-11/70 across the street. The deal will be posted on the exchange after the PDP receives this information.

The process takes about 15 minutes from the time the trader completes the deal until the time he can see it posted on the ticker. That sysem worked well enough in 1973, when the exchange handled some 100 trades a day, Herriott says. The trader had enough time to fill out the form and place it securely on the conveyor, so that few trades were lost for very long. Now, says bank vice president John M. Wigzell, the same traders handle 1,000 trades a day, and often deal so quickly that they cannot write down all their trades on separate slips of paper. The result is that they keep a running list on a scratch pad, which intermediaries must then rewrite and stick on the conveyor; with a little luck, the paper reaches the other end and the data entry clerks key it correctly into the system. “We need a better system just to stay in the game,” Herriott says.

A few miles uptown, Merrill Lynch and Co.’s Advanced Technology Development Department is developing new ways for the financial services firm’s branch offices to improve the quality of information that reaches clients. The group is looking at videodisks, portable computers, teletext touch-screen technologies, and just about anything else that may give the company a strategic advantage, says systems analyst David Rosien. Right now Rossien is examining several ways to provide clients with direct access to Merrill Lynch’s databases in a controlled manner, so that they cannot make unauthorized entries or typographical errors.