Many people think it is a gimmick | 'suspended touch phone' | What the hell is it?

The most attractive new feature of Sony's Xperia sola, released a few years ago, is the new Floating Touch technology, which allows users to touch the screen without touching the phone.

At that time, many people thought that this was just a gimmick, and there was not much practical significance.

This kind of thinking is obviously wrong. The emergence of a new technology must have its meaning. However, this technology is still in the experimental stage. For the time being, only Xperia sola's built-in browser and dynamic desktop support this technology, users can Browse the web without touching the screen, or interact with the desktop.

How does the suspension touch technology work? What is the working principle of the floating touch technology?

Like many smartphones, hovering touch uses capacitive touch sensing to record user input on the screen. There are two capacitive sensors on the touch screen, namely mutual capacitance and self capacitance, where mutual capacitance is used to achieve multi-touch detection; Self-capacitance can produce a stronger signal than mutual capacitance, detecting farther finger sensing, but due to an effect called 'Ghosting', multi-point detection is not possible.

As shown in the two hand-painted diagrams below, the circle represents the touch point, and the ghost position mutual capacitance realizes multi-touch. Each line in the figure below will form a parallel plate capacitor, which means that each A crossover point is a capacitor, which in turn ensures that the measurement can be accurate to each finger and achieve multi-touch.

However, because the area between the two lines is small, the electric field of the sensor is also small. The sensor is so small that the signal strength is low, so when the user's finger hovers over the screen, the mutual capacitance The sensor can't sense these very weak signals.

In the case of self-capacitance, each X or Y line in the figure below is a capacitive sensor. Obviously, self-capacitance sensors are larger than mutual capacitance. Large sensors can create powerful signals that allow the device to detect Fingers at 20mm above the screen. When a finger is on the screen or above the screen, the sensor line closest to the finger will be activated. If two fingers are detected, four lines will be activated and the ghost effect will appear.

As shown in the figure above, when two fingers are detected, four possible t touch points (X1, Y0), (X1, Y2), (X3, YO) and (X3, Y2) appear correctly. The combination is unclear, so multi-touch hovering can not be achieved by running self-capacitance and mutual capacitance on a capacitive touch screen. Mutual capacitance is used to complete normal touch sensing, including multiple Point touch, and self-capacitance is used to detect the finger hovering above.

Since the floating touch technology relies on self-capacitance, it is impossible to achieve floating multi-touch. That is to say, when the floating operation is performed, the screen does not support multi-touch, and only multi-touch is realized in the case of contact and touch. With the existing capacitive touch sensor, it is possible to distinguish between floating touch and contact touch, but only the application from the 'suspension touch event will respond to the floating touch, so the actual application of the technology is internal. Program support.

Suspension touch technology in the future

Through the above we understand the working principle of the floating touch technology, then what is the use of this technology? We may wish to expand Lenovo. As we all know, capacitive touch screen has a big flaw, that is, in the winter we It is very inconvenient to remove the gloves to operate the phone.

In the end, the hovering touch is a bit like the gesture operation. According to the actual performance of the Samsung Galaxy S6, the hovering touch performs better in sliding up and down, but it often appears unrecognizable in the click performance.

If the hovering touch technology is mature, we can use the touch screen with thick gloves, which will bring great convenience to users.

In terms of games, we can also make full use of this technology to bring a better user experience. For example, when playing a racing game, the precision of the throttle and brake can be controlled to be high enough according to the depth of the finger press.

Of course, this technology is just the need for 'overhanging touch energy. It's not just that. How much technology can be developed depends on how software development engineers use it.

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