Stupid Question 113: How come Nokia WP8 touch works when used with gloves? (does it?)

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

Very proud of educating myself on the different types of touch screens I got this question by a friend a few days ago, as I was bragging about the latest windows phone. I’m currently working on a cross platform app that targets windows phone 8- and I had just received the test phone.

Windows Phone 8 has a multi-touch capacitive touch screen, and at Nokia is using Synaptics new ClearPad Series 3 touchscreen that gives the phone a very super sensitive capacitive touch screen that can register touch even through clothing layers. It provides different profiles that it switches which gives the phone ‘smart’ sensing for accurate location of the touch. The Super Sensitive Touch technology is new on the smartphone platform, and although I was a bit skeptic of how well this would actually work, after testing it, I am pleasantly surprised and I hope this is will soon become a standard so I get to wear my favorite gloves instead of ugly touch gloves.

The touch still works as capacitive touch works,its all about electric fields. Any material that contains conductive electrolytes will interfere with the electric field, and remember- it doesn’t necessarily mean that there has to be physical touch for that to happend - just hovering really close could also work in theory. So I tried with a few things, and in a few ways. Of course some of the material used aren’t conductive at all but I wanted to illustrate what worked and what didn’t. have fun :D

Nokia WP8 touch works through one layer of jeans material

Nokia WP8 touch does not work when tested with a pebble

Nokia WP8 touch does work with a metal spoon

Nokia WP8 touch does work through three pages of newspaper

Nokia WP8 touch does not work through a thick leaf

Nokia WP8 touch does not work with a ping pong ball

Nokia WP8 touch does work with a pen that has a metal tip

Nokia WP8 touch does not work through three layers of jeans

Comments

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Fredrik Björeman

12/27/2012 8:49:38 AM

Nice roundup! I could see this becoming a photo meme :-) 

Last modified on 2012-12-26