Shenzen New Degree Technology was one of the companies showing its stuff in the Eureka Park portion of CES 2013, and this China-based hardware startup had some impressive tech to show off related to touch input. Combining capacitive and resistive touch-based input with a means to make it work even on solid stainless steel surfaces, Shenzen New Degree hopes to pave the way for a wide range of new products with built-in controls that are highly durable, retaining their touch sensitive abilities even after considerable wear and tear.
The interesting thing about Shenzen New Degree’s tech is that it can provide both the levels of accuracy and sensitivity it manages while still also remaining durable enough that you can pour water on it, as the company showed me at their booth in Eureka Park. The environmental toughness of this implementation means it’ll be able to be used in a wide range of applications where touch devices would be exposed to the elements, like in kitchen appliances, outdoor digital keypads and parking meters, and the high sensitivity will make for a much better user experience than the resistive touch tech generally used in most commercial-grade touch panels.
Another benefit, as you can see in the video above, is that the panels can detect not only standard number sequence codes, but also the degree of force used to press, meaning that if someone wanted to not only have the numeric entry, but also the force with which it was entered as a secondary security measure, they could easily do that. All in all, it’s a pretty amazing component technology that I’m sure we’ll see picked up by a lot of OEMs fairly quickly.