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Displax Overlay Multitouch turns your LCD or plasma into a touchscreen, demands a pretty penny
Remember when Displax teased us earlier in the year with a polymer film that could take any conventional LCD, plasma or RPTV and turn it into a touchscreen? Yeah, well now that very technology is shipping to Average Joes and Janes like yourself your good pal Jim. Starting nowish, the outfit's customizable Overlay Multitouch will be heading out to screens ranging from 32- to 103-inches in size in order to add multitouch capabilities to a screen that previously hated even the thought of being groped. Of course, with a starting tag of €1,300 ($1,805), we get the impression that most of the orders (at least initially) will be coming from corporations looking to jazz up their boardrooms. In related news, the company is also debuting a 42-inch Windows 7-based multitouch table that can detect up to four independent touches at once. The Oqtopus uses a specific kind of optical technology that allows bare fingers, styluses and even gloved hands to operate it, but with a starting price of €4,500 ($6,250), we're guessing your own personal Santa is already signaling "no." %Gallery-104429%
Displax multitouch film actually developed by Visual Planet, frowny faces all around
Ready for another dustup in multitouch land? Turns out that cool Displax multitouch film we saw a few days ago is actually called ViP Interactive Foil, and was developed in 2004 by a company called Visual Planet -- Displax was just showing it off to promote their new touch controller, but didn't tell anyone about the source of the film when that's where all the interest was. Naturally that's got Visual Planet in a bit of a tizzy, especially since it's developing a touch controller of its own for release down the line; the two companies have been partners in the past but there's no agreement now. Displax says it's looking at several suppliers for the film as it rolls towards that promised July ship date -- we'll see if any of this gets sorted out by then.
Displax film could turn nearly any surface into touchscreen, make your keyboard irate
Light Blue Optics already blew our minds up with its touchscreen-creating projector, but it looks like Displax will be the one to really turn the touchpanel into a modern day commodity. The Portugal-based company is trumpeting a new polymer film that can be stuck onto or just under glass, plastic or wood in order to transform a vanilla surface into one that responds to touch and airflow. Furthermore, the tech can be overlayed on curved panels, and it also plays nice with opaque and transparent surfaces. As the story goes, an array of nanowires embedded in the film recognizes your digits or pointed breath, and it then passes the information along to a microcontroller and software suite that transforms the inputs into reactions on your system. In its current form, the solution can detect up to 16 touch points on a 50-inch screen, and if all goes well, the first Displax-enabled wares will start shipping this July. Huzzah! [Thanks, Ben]
