What is digital media?

What is digital media? (Touch screen tecnology)
As a designer I feel that it is important to have an understanding of digital media. Digital Media is a form of technology which allows users to interact,communicate and entertain.The digital media I have chosen is touch screen technology, this is highly related to the current project as I am asked to design a series of application icons. Most common phones to date are touch screen based as their price have massively dropped over the past decade. Touch screen phones work using 3 basic systems that are used to recognise a persons touch

• Resistive
• Capacitive 
• Surface acoustic wave

The resistive system consists of a normal glass panel that is covered with a conductive and a resistive metallic layer. These two layers are held apart by spacers, and a scratch-resistant layer is placed on top of the whole setup. An electrical current runs through the two layers while the monitor is operational. When a user touches the screen, the two layers make contact in that exact spot. The change in the electrical field is noted and the coordinates of the point of contact are calculated by the computer. Once the coordinates are known, a special driver translates the touch into something that the operating system can understand, much as a computer mouse driver translates a mouse's movements into a click or a drag.

In the capacitive system, a layer that stores electrical charge is placed on the glass panel of the monitor. When a user touches the monitor with his or her finger, some of the charge is transferred to the user, so the charge on the capacitive layer decreases. This decrease is measured in circuits located at each corner of the monitor. The computer calculates, from the relative differences in charge at each corner, exactly where the touch event took place and then relays that information to the touch-screen driver software. One advantage that the capacitive system has over the resistive system is that it transmits almost 90 percent of the light from the monitor, whereas the resistive system only transmits about 75 percent. This gives the capacitive system a much clearer picture than the resistive system.



http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question716.htm