=Research Writing (Rough Draft)=

Touch screen have exploded into the consumer technology market over the past few years and aims at replacing the traditional input device like mouse and keyboard. This new technology allows users to operate a technological device in a more natural way. However, touch screen technology have inherited drawbacks that have “sub-consciously” been solved in other less intuitive methods of input, such as low haptic feedback. These problems could be partially overcome by implementing vibrations or audio feedback to help provide a better feel.

A small survey was conducted to various users of touch screen technology to gather their comfort level of using such technology. The results indicate that (a) a lot of users own or use some form of touch screen technology in their life, (b) they also feel additional haptic feedback to let the user knows that a button was pressed, and (c) different, more efficient layout of the application would help reduce error rate. Various touch screen benefits and their flaws are discussed.

The human touch is possibly one of the most intimate acts of human sensuality. Touch is one of the ways human explore the world around them as an infant. The action of touching can be emotive and sooth another individual or an act of trust. Thus, touch screen technology is an effort by researchers to enable humans to interact directly and more intimately with machines. Due to the recent explosion of technological advancements in the mass consumer field, touch screen technology have taken over multiple technological products in the consumer market such as mobile devices, interactive portable advertisement boards, point-of-sale terminals and so on. Such touch screen technologies aims at eliminating the use of traditional, less intuitive input devices and provide a more natural interaction between humans and computers. Through natural interaction, users can gain quick and fast access to digital information from technological devices while maintaining similar or increased level of usability as compared to other devices like the mouse and keyboard.

Roy Bragg noted in his post that many industry leaders and analyst believe that as more and more innovative systems evolves; it will revolutionize how humans can interact with computers. To help users continue to achieve natural interaction with technologies, researchers managed to implement the features of multi-touch, where multiple users can interact on the same screen, as well as Microsoft’s PixelSense™. With PixelSense, every pixels on the screen is converted to act as a camera sensor, thereby, it is capable to record images as well a human touch. Since the introduction of the Apple’s iPhone, it had set a precedent as to how future input technologies would evolve in its effort try to help user feel and interact digital objects through different gestures.

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