Membrane That Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen

Light Blue Optics already blew our minds up with its touchscreen-creating projector, but it looks like Displax will be the one to really turn the touchpanel into a modern day commodity. The Portugal-based company is trumpeting a new polymer film that can be stuck onto or just under glass, plastic or wood in order to transform a vanilla surface into one that responds to touch and airflow. Furthermore, the tech can be overlayed on curved panels, and it also plays nice with opaque and transparent surfaces. As the story goes, an array of nanowires embedded in the film recognizes your digits or pointed breath, and it then passes the information along to a microcontroller and software suite that transforms the inputs into reactions on your system. In its current form, the solution can detect up to 16 touch points on a 50-inch screen, and if all goes well, the first Displax-enabled wares will start shipping this July.