Touchscreens are a familiar cornerstone of many of our favorite technologies; smartphones, in particular, rely heavily on their use, and commercial retailers are adopting touchscreen technologies to provide ease-of-use to customers. Though widely used, touchscreens do not scale easily to large surfaces, irregular shapes, or arbitrary surface materials. As touchscreens become more ubiquitous, there arises a demonstrable need for new types of touch interfaces that will work with future technologies and integrate into irregular structures. PLASTIC allows almost any surface and any material to be used as a touchscreen or touch interface, transforming how people interact with technology while providing durable and cost-effective alternatives to current touchscreen designs. As touchscreen manufacturers increase R&D expenditures in an effort to gain a technological advantage, PLASTIC will allow companies to push boundaries unencumbered by current touchscreen limitations.
Description
PLASTIC, Pressure & Location-based Acoustic Sensing Touch Interface Using Classification, is a system that makes use of a resonant touch interface, a single mechanical exciter, a single mechanical sensor, and a simple trained machine learning classifier to create many new types of versatile, adaptable, dynamic touch interfaces. PLASTIC is most similar to surface acoustic wave touchscreen technologies, but in place of sensor arrays with complicated multiple-in/multiple-out algorithms, a software classifier with simpler hardware detects changes in surface waveforms and uses a machine learning tool to identify the pressure amplitude and location based on a set of harmonics in the detected waveform. This novel method of creating detecting and classifying user interaction with a touchscreen device can cheaply and easily make large displays into pressure-sensitive surfaces and enables the use of irregular shaped or lightweight, weatherproof, or damage-resistant materials into touch interfaces.
Applications
· Development of cutting-edge touch interfaces for innovative new technologies
· Smartphones
· Retail and industrial touchscreens
· Internet of Things
Advantages
· Cheaply and easily make large-scale touch interfaces
· Expands range of touch-enabled materials to include lightweight, weatherproof, and damage-resistant materials, as well as irregular shapes
· Haptic feedback can be easily integrated
Invention Readiness
Prototype
IP Status
https://patents.google.com/patent/US11836319B2
