You’ve seen it before. A slot player spills a drink on his table-top slot machine. The sticky liquid seeps along the chassis, temporarily disabling its touch recognition. As the player turns his head to see if anyone noticed, a friendly member of the slot floor personnel comes by to wipe off the screen.
But even after the mess is cleaned, some liquid residue remains and the frustrated player walks off to find a different game, cursing his clumsiness and praying that the next person won’t take his spot on the progressive.
But, what if liquid had no effect on touch detection? What if even a scratch on the screen had no effect?
Well no more what ifs. The future is here and you can touch it.
Sound Roots
Founded 35 years ago in Oakridge, Tenn. Elo TouchSystems, a division of Tyco Electronics, invented the first touch technology—a five-wire resistant-screen technology—which founded the entire touch screen industry. Since then, Elo has seen phenomenal growth. They have expanded into international markets, most recently China, Argentina, and Brazil. Even more impressive, the company continues to grow in the double-digits each year, largely thanks to their financially sound parent companies Tyco Electronics and Tyco International: They give Elo their allowance and Elo invests wisely.
Elo TouchSystems offers a variety of products, specifically designed to meet the unique demands of the casino. Mark Mendenhall, president of Elo TouchSystems, said, “Our current profile of products includes about six or seven different major touch technologies that we sell and incorporate into a number of different monitor configurations, ranging in size from as small as four inches up to 32 inches. The majority of the sizes used in gaming are the 17 and 19 inch monitors.”
APR’s Working Rhythm
APR technology is unique, even glamorous. APR offers features other touch technologies only dream of. “What’s really neat about APR technology is most other touch technologies have some kind of active signal going through them…instead, APR has a series of four microphones on the back of the glass screen, which is the sensor. When the user touches the glass, he generates a sound. And that sound can be very quiet. In fact, just dragging a finger over the screen, generates enough sound through friction.
“What we do is take that sound generated by the interaction of the user with the screen and look at the wave characteristics of that sound and compare it to a predetermined set of values that we’ve created in our factory to get a match between where the sound is generated by its wave characteristics, and where we know that sound can only be generated because of those characteristics,” Mendenhall said. Once the processor has detected the sound’s wave characteristics, the processor finds the match and reports that location.
“Because it doesn’t require a lot of processing power this can be done quickly, simply, and accurately, ” he added. Impressive.
Searching for Sound Technology
For 18 years, Elo manufactured acoustic-based touch screen technologies. And, once they developed Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW), the technology was extremely successful. But, with each new touch screen technology—like capacitive, resistive, and infrared—they realized each had its limitations. And they embarked on a search for a perfectly sound touch technology.
“There are many problems with some of the current touch technologies out there. With resistive technology it’s wear characteristics. With SAW the problem is surface contamination. With capacitive it’s wear and visual characteristics, people aren’t able to use it with a gloved hand or a stylus. What we were trying to do is find a better acoustic technology where we didn’t have to worry about electrical noise, and at the same time, solve some of the wear characteristics that are present in our resistive product.
“Because we also wanted to pursue a lot of portable applications, we needed to develop something that was passive, low-power, and could be used in mobile applications as well. And that’s what drove us to creating a spec for APR and the development of the technology. It’s been along time coming and has been very difficult to perfect.”
One of the most difficult aspects of creating the product was making sure that it was cost-competitive with existing technologies—something that would be crucial to its success.
“We realized that when we introduced the product to the market, even with all the added features I’ve talked about, it needed to be cost-competitive. That was difficult to accomplish, but there has been some technological advances in other parts of the industry that have helped facilitate our goals.
“For example, the cost of flash memory has allowed us to reach cost targets so that we are able to offer the technology competitively. If you were to buy an Acoustic Pulse Recognition monitor from us, it would be the same price as a resistive, capacitive, or SAW monitor….We think that long term, as volume picks up, this will inevitably be the highest-performing, lowest-cost touch technology in the industry,” Mendenhall said.
Elo has taken the industry’s pulse, listened to it, and used its rhythm to create one of the most advanced, all encompassing, touch technologies to date.
Transitioning
Initially, Elo targeted the product at point-of-sale (POS) and retail markets because they were trying to solve the problem of wear-out that often occurs with resistive and capacitive screens. APR addressed those problems, and as they introduced it into the market, realized that their gaming customers had quite an interest in the technology for other reasons.
“The clarity of the image, the ability to have palm rejection—where you can rest your hand on the screen and continue to use it—and the durability of the product, were all appealing features to the gaming sector. We are in discussions with a number of gaming manufacturers right now in incorporating APR in next generation products.
“It actually uses the PC in the POS equipment to do some of the processing to determine the location. But, in the gaming world they really needed a dedicated processor, and that dedicated processor or controller card, will be introduced in the first quarter of this year.
“What we want to do is remove the processing time, particularly in gaming machines, which take a lot of the processor duties.” In POS equipment, the processor is idle most of the time. In gaming machines the processor is active almost all the time. Elo has taken that into consideration and by moving the processing capabilities back to the controller, they freed up the processor in the gaming machine. “In the gaming industry you don’t want to change drivers or controllers on a regular basis because you have to re-certify your equipment,” Mendenhall said.
“The nice thing about our entire portfolio of products is we have one driver which has a standard interface for any of the touch technologies—infrared, surface acoustic wave, capacitive, and resistive.”
Elo calls this standard driver Smart Set Protocol; it’s one driver regardless of what touch technology is attached to the equipment. This allows gaming manufacturers to use any of Elo’s touch screen technologies without having to change software, requiring minimal re-certification on the equipment. This interoperability is unique solely to Elo. With technology that easy to integrate, it’s no wonder Elo TouchSystems is the largest touch screen technology company in the world.
Maintenance
Glass. It’s smooth, transparent, easy to clean, and easy to size—that’s the standard surface used with APR. But, APR can be used in front of almost any surface—not just glass, leaving endless possibilities.
“Because all the sensors are on the back of the glass, you can completely seal to the bezel the front-end of the glass. So it can make it completely spill proof and tamper resistant. Since everything is on the back and there are no active parts, you’re just listening for sounds…so there really is no maintenance required.
“APR uses just clear glass with an antiglare coating on the front, so any standard surface glass cleaner, even ones with abrasives, will work just fine and clean like a glass window. There isn’t any required special cleaning or handling, and it even works through contamination on the surface,” Mendenhall said.
The Future of Touch Screen Technology
Mendenhall is a forward-thinker, as most presidents of technology-based companies are. He sees great things for the coming years with the new APR technology: “Where we see it going inevitably, after [manufacturers] see the technology prove itself, is to potentially replace all the existing touch technologies out there. Because it is a lot easier to integrate in terms of noise immunity, you don’t have to worry about the electro-magnetic interference (EMI) generated by the game.”
Elo can scale the APR technology to any size. “We’re seeing new games coming out with very large panels and narrow borders. So, if you want multiple displays, you can position our APR monitors much closer together than any other touch technology, because there is only a six millimeter border on it, as opposed to a 12 to 15 millimeter border for other touch technologies.
“What’s nice about this technology is that eventually we can make the multiplayer games on the same surface, so that we can detect multiple touches and sounds, and send those to the computer as multiple points. When I say multi-player, I mean on the same surface, as opposed to multiple players with multiple displays.”
Mendenhall foresees the multi-touch, multi-user interface as a key feature going forward. But, that is difficult. The operating system that processes the signal must be able to accept multiple, simultaneous inputs. And the touch detection technology must provide that data to the operating system.
Mendenhall related, “If there are 20 people gathered around a touch table, and 20 people place bets, the technology must be able to process which 20 of those people bet what, and what that value is. Then after the people spin the wheel or roll the die, the technology must be able to do the right payoff. The technology will have to know what the different inputs given to the computer are, and then process the results from that. That is the next big leap forward.”
So, for all you gamers, managers, executives, inventors, and manufacturers who are perpetually clumsy, the future of touch technology has arrived, and it’s spill-proof, scratch proof, and completely flat. Who knows? Maybe the next generation touch technology will even be loss-proof…Well, three out of four ain’t bad.
The Pulse of the Future
In June of 2006 Elo introduced their newest and smartest touch technology: Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR).
“It offers some neat functions…” Mendenhall said. But perhaps “neat” underestimates the power of the new technology. The benefits of APR are myriad:
• A pure glass overlay allows for optimal graphic representation and durability
•Recognizes multiple styluses: fingers, gloved fingers, prosthetic hand, pen, pencil, credit card, room-key, etc.
• Resistant to liquids, dust, grease
• No wear-out mechanism
• Works through scratches and abrasions
• Excellent drag performance
• Sealable to NEMA 4/IP 65 standards
• One time factory calibration, no drift
• Features thin borders—only 5mm
• Completely flat surface
• Available in small and large sizes
• Palm rejection empowers signature capture
• Cost-competitive
• Passive technology, requires minimal processing power
Krista Cofer may be reached at editor1[at]aceme.org.
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