All the touch devices we have in market today like iPads, iPhones, Samsung tablets and phones, etc. have a very small issue – 100 milliseconds of lag. The lag is the amount of time a touch device takes to respond after you touch the device. The 100 milliseconds of lag may not be an issue when you are tapping and swapping the interface elements on a device, but they are apparent when you wing your finger around the screen faster. For example if you use any painting app, the lag is very obvious and screen responds slowly than an artist can paint with his finger.
Researchers at Microsoft labs came out with a prototype of touch device that drastically cuts down the 100 milliseconds of lag time to just 1 millisecond. That’s 100 times faster than today’s touch screen devices. Check out the video embedded below for a demo of new touch screen.
Over at TechCrunch, Chris Velazco says:
The difference is staggering, especially when Dietz trots out the slow-motion footage. With the delay between touch input and screen response slashed by orders of magnitude, a device that sports the sort of super-low-latency Dietz envisions has the potential to feel far more (for lack of a better term) natural than its brethren. There’s zero delay when you slide a checker across a board, for example, and bringing that sort of instantaneous feedback to the many screens in our lives could help to bridge the gap between operating a bit of software and the feeling of interacting with objects.
It will be great boost to Microsoft’s tablet strategy if they succeed in bringing this research into mass market and allow it’s partners to use the technology on Windows 8 tablets.