A touch therapy for the tech-savvy

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Breakthroughs often beget other breakthroughs, and Apple’s slick use of touch-screen technology on its iPhone has set touch-screen makers to salivating.

An industry once relegated to niches now sees the potential for riches.

The market for touch screens has grown quietly for years, both in commercial applications like restaurant point-of-sale systems, credit card signature readers or automated teller machines, and in consumer devices like global positioning systems and game platforms. But touch screens haven’t created much excitement as the main way for people to use things like phones or computers or other consumer electronics — until now.

“Apple changed everybody’s mind about touch,” says Geoff Walker, global director of product management at Tyco Electronics’ Elo TouchSystems unit, a big seller of touch screens. That iPhone users can so easily resize photos with just a pinch or a flick of their fingertips is “super cool,” he says.

In particular, Apple changed minds about what is called multi-touch technology. A multi-touch screen is exactly what it sounds like: a screen that can accept input from multiple touches at once. If you haven’t seen an iPhone in action, you might have seen CNN commentators zipping around the “Magic Wall” during election coverage; the wall uses technology developed by Perceptive Pixel, a startup in New York.

Apple uses multi-touch screens in which a slight electrical charge reacts to the human body’s own electrical field, rather than pressure. There are other kinds of multi-touch technology, but all are among the more expensive types of touch technology, industry observers say. High prices had caused multi-touch to languish before the iPhone’s introduction.

But the success of the iPhone has encouraged other companies to explore multi-touch screens. It might follow that if people like using their fingers on the screen of a cell phone, they would like it even better on the bigger displays of computers. That’s the hope of N-trig (pronounced “intrigue”), an eight-year-old Israeli company that makes a multi-touch screen that can be used with a pen as well a finger.

The ability to work with both convinced Dell to put the N-trig screen into the Latitude XT, a hybrid computer that’s smaller than a laptop but bigger than a tablet model. N-trig’s ability to respond to multi-touch made it possible to use a finger as a mouse and a pen to write messages.