It seems that Apple it’s trying to take in consideration a new type of touchscreen technology that determines pressure sesitivity just by using a combination of capacitive touch and infrared light sensing. This new technology was seen in a new Apple patent published by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The patent application reveals a method of determining the force of a user’s touch gesture on a capacitive display by using infrared lines that are transmitted from transmitters and receivers positioned under the frame of the glass that is covering the display. In this way, capacitive touch and light will determinate the position of the finger on the display and it can also distinguish a soft touch from a harder touch.
Even this technology (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) isn’t something really new, because we already seen it on several large-screened multi-touch devices from Microsoft, it might prove really useful in apps and games on the future iDevice from Apple.
