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Touching News
SMART develops new touch technology for interactive displays
By Steven Klapow

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of touch-sensitive displays. Who doesn’t like the idea of being able to control screen actions without a keyboard or mouse, or annotating a video with the mere movement of a finger? Unfortunately, the technology usually suffers some shortcomings:

	In some cases, users need a special stylus.
	The display cannot determine whether a user is hovering an input device over the screen or actual contact is being made.
	Although they can enable touch sensitivity, special overlays and films can reduce the clarity, brightness and contrast of whatever is being displayed.
	To remain effective, overlays like the ones mentioned above are constrained to smaller sizes.

SMART Technologies last month adapted two of its SMART Board displays to include technology that lets users interact with the displays without making any of the above-mentioned sacrifices. The Rear Projection SMART Board 3000i (a self-contained display) and SMART Board for Plasma Displays (an overlay for plasma units) employ what the company calls Digital Vision Touch technology, or DViT.

Getting to the Point
DViT lets users of interactive displays move a cursor and input commands with a finger or any pointing device. Unlike “analog resistive” devices that have two thinly separated surfaces that react to pressure between them, SMART Boards with DViT are not constrained by display size. “With analog resistive, the display is limited to 72 inches [diagonal],” says David Martin, chairman and co-CEO of SMART, based in Calgary, Alberta.

By adding DViT technology to the rear-projection SMART Board, says product manager James Rempel, the company was able to increase brightness by 34 percent, and the contrast ratio by 133 percent. The plasma overlay’s brightnesss rose by 21 percent, and contrast, by 15 percent. Meanwhile, the suggested retail price of these products has not changed. The suggested retail price of the 3000i is $16,999, and the overlay prices range from $3,299 to $4,999.

How Does It Work?
Each DViT-equipped SMART Board has small digital DSP-equipped CMOS cameras in each of the four corners of the display area. The cameras, each with a 90-degree field of view, identify pointers, fingers or anything else users might use to point to the screen. A master DSP controller, working in concert with the cameras, plots the X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) coordinates of the pointer and sends the data via USB or a serial port to whatever application is being used. It also measures the Z coordinate-the distance of a pointer or finger-from the surface, which helps determine the difference between pointing and mere hovering.

Touch and Test
Just prior to DViT’s release, I had the opportunity to test the technology. One of the first things I noticed about it was how much more naturally the DViT-enabled SMART displays reacted to touch. Touch-sensitive displays and screens often leave the user with the feeling of touching a shark tank-the small distance between one’s finger and the actual content at which one is pointing feels tremendous, even if the actual separation is quite thin.

The SMART boards with DViT, however, had a very natural feel and response, as if I were touching each letter of a Word document, each cell of an Excel sheet, each line and brush stroke in a painting application. I felt as though I was truly interacting with the content being displayed.

(Reprinted with permission, AV Video Multimedia Producer, April 2003)