The history of touch screen technology dates back to 1965, when E.A. Johnson invented what is widely regarded as the first finger-actuated touch screen technology. His article in Electronic Letters entitled "Touch display - a novel input/output device for computers" outlined the beginnings of capacitive touch technology used in many modern personal Electronic Letters", which outlined the beginnings of the capacitive touch technology used in many modern personal devices.
Moving into the 1970s, Dr Sam Hurst developed a new type of sensor called the "Elograph", which was opaque and very different from today's touch screens. The technology required touch to bring a conductive layer into contact with another layer containing the X and Y axes underneath, and then transmit the coordinates to a computer. We now call this touchscreen technology "resistive" and it is one of the most commonly used touchscreen technologies.
By 1982, Nimish Mehta of the University of Toronto had developed a "touchpad" device that used frosted glass and had a camera behind it that recognised shadows and dark spots on the screen. This gesture interaction technique was later used by American computer artist Myron Krueger to design an optical system that could track hand movements. The system, initially known as Video Place, was later renamed Video Desk in 1983.
In the 1980s, touchscreens became commercially available and were used in computers with infrared (IR) detectors around the edges to detect the user's fingers interacting with the screen.In 1983, Bob Boie of Bell Labs created a new transparent touch overlay through the use of capacitive arrays on CRTs, an advancement that laid the groundwork for today's capacitive technology in tablets and smartphones.
In 1993, the first mobile phone equipped with touchscreen technology was created. The device featured advanced pagination, email, appointment scheduling, an address book, a calculator, and a resistive touchscreen for navigating menus and entering data.
In the late 1990s, Wayne Westerman, a graduate student at the University of Delaware, published a doctoral thesis entitled "Hand Tracking, Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface". "Westerman then founded a company called FingerWorks, which began making gesture-based products, including the iGesture pad, a device that allows gestures with one hand. 2005 saw the acquisition of FingerWorks by Apple. FingerWorks was acquired by Apple, and two years later the technology was widely used in Apple's mobile phones and music players.
With the mass adoption of projected capacitive touch technology in smartphones and tablets, the demand for touchscreen technology is gradually increasing, especially in large format commercial applications such as digital signage, industrial and point-of-sale (POS), where the need for interaction is driving further innovation and development of touchscreen technology.