Touchscreens, touch screens,touch panels or touchscreen panels are display overlays which are typically either pressure-sensitive (resistive), electrically-sensisitive (capacitance), acoustically-sensitive (SAW - surface acoustic wave) or photo-sensitive (infra-red). The effect of such overlays allows a display to be used as an input device, removing the keyboard and/or the mouse as the primary input device for interacting with the display's content. Such displays can be attached to computers or, as terminals, to networks.

Touchscreens have become commonplace since the invention of the electronic touch interface in 1971 by Dr. Samuel C. Hurst. They have become familiar in retail settings, on point of sale systems, on ATMs and on PDAs where a stylus is sometimes used to manipulate the GUI and to enter data. The popularity of smart phones, PDAs, portable game consoles and many types of information appliances is driving the demand for, and the acceptance of, touchscreens.

Touchscreens are popular in heavy industry and in other situations where keyboards and mice do not allow a satisfactory intuitive, rapid or accurate interaction by the user with the display's content.

The most important long term significance of the touchscreen is the potential that it affords for the building of dynamic graphical languages which, as virtual realities which can mimick spoken languages and can add Internet-spanning, collaborative extensions to spoken languages.

External links

• How stuff works ~ How do touchscreen monitors know where you're touching?