New Transparent Touchscreen Technology Knows Who You Are

Touchscreens have become the backbone of modern computing. Most people use one everyday, and they’re getting ever more popular. But I bet there are a whole bunch of people who don’t know how a touchscreen really works. It’s not a very complex technology like you might think, but it’s not exactly a simple solution either. A new kind of transparent touchscreen will give us all a look inside this widely popular technology, and why it has become such a huge success.

This new transparent touchscreen technology was created by researchers over at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, and it could come to revolutionize the way our computers sense and recognize us. The standard touchscreen, the one we all use today, basically senses subtle changes in electrical current transmitted into the sheets of glass. This can be achieved with sound and light as well. But today’s touchscreens can’t determine who is touching the touchscreen. That’s something researchers have tried to solve for a long time since it could add yet another layer of usefulness and security to touchscreen devices.

Researchers over at Disney Research have finally cracked the code which has resulted in a transparent touchscreen that can sense exactly who is touching the screen. The new transparent touchscreen device is called Touché, and it sends a series of harmless currents through the user’s body. The body reacts differently to each current, and through that, the transparent touchscreen device can determine your bone density, muscle mass, blood volume, and water content. This data will become a unique biological key which only you can produce, thus making you the activator of a device set to react to only your biological key.

As of right now, this technology is quite fresh, and it’s not set to be included in any devices within the immediate future. The concept is quite impressive though, and it could mean mobile device security gets a huge bump and becomes harder to crack. In combination with a password, it’s virtually impossible to break into a mobile device sporting these collaborative features. Because of this, the transparent touchscreen Touché can recognize several different users on a touchscreen surface at once and distinguish what fingers belong to what user. It’s quite mind-boggling when you think about it.