Touch screens for kiosk applications

views:

159

answers:

+2 Q:

Touch screens for kiosk applications

I'm developing a kiosk-style touchscreen application in Qt. Currently I'm using an Elo Touch surface acoustic wave touchmonitor which works well except for one thing: drag performance is way too poor to provide a good user experience. As this is the case for the cursor in X as well as in my application, it seems to be either the fault of X (probably not) or the touchmonitor. Since mobile platforms are able to achieve very high performance in this regard, it seems like it should be possible for vastly more powerful desktop systems.

Does anybody have experience with getting good drag performance out of desktop touchmonitors? What hardware have you used? Is X to blame?

What do you mean from drag performance? Is it the accuracy of the touch, or the graphics performance of the system? If the latter, I'd blame your computer rather than your monitor. If it is the former, I'd consider another touch technology (though, SAW has its benefits in a kiosk environment)

e8johan 2010-02-17 10:23:52

Touch is perfectly accurate. The problem is that neither the mouse in X (or touch events in my Qt app) are able to keep up with a finger running over the screen. On devices like the iPhone, there is a 1:1 correlation between movements of you finger and events on the screen. On my SAW touchscreen, this is not the case and it hurts usability.What touchscreen technologies will provide a better user experience?

Micah 2010-02-17 20:44:30

I do not think that this has anything to do with SAW, but rather what you move and how it is drawn. I.e. simple graphics performance. What is it that you try to move? What type of hardware do you use (CPU, GPU, memory, etc)

e8johan 2010-02-18 08:48:37

It's not my application, because just moving the mouse around in X is also slow, which means that the mouse events that X is sending my application are slow.

Micah 2010-02-18 19:43:04

or, the drawing is slow. Have you considered that?

e8johan 2010-02-19 07:03:23

With the kiosk touchscreen software that we have developed we have tried a large number of different types of setups and the one we have been most satisfied with is the all-in-one Panel PC from http://www.ieoem.com/TPS-panel-pc.htm. The touch accuracy is very good and dragging works well.

Keith Maurino 2010-02-19 14:03:16

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Touch screens for kiosk applications

related questions