While some of us are still waiting for our favourite Symbian smartphone manufacturer to widely embrace capacitive touch screens, have you spared a thought for the next leap in touch screen technology? Well, your next generation touch screen could be utilising Quantum Tunnelling Composites (QTC).

Imaging a drawing application, you are drawing a line and it’s not as thick as you want, so you simply press harder on the screen and your line grows wider. You want to type a capital from you onscreen keyboard, no need to press a shift key, simply press the key hard.

A limitation of today’s touch screens is that they are not very good at doing more than knowing you are touching them or not touching them. There are only limited methods for recognising how hard you are pressing on the screen. A screen that accurately detects the pressure applied by its user has the potential to offer a paradigm shift in UI interaction. This shift could range from the obvious – pressure on the screen equates to how hard the throttle is being pressed in a racing game, to entirely new ways to interact with a UI. Currently designers are staring to experiment with 3D UIs; accurate force sensitive touch screens would enable interaction in 3D as well.

Quantum Tunnelling Composites (QTC) promise to enable these new interactions. QTC is a fascinating material that offers unique touch sensitivity properties. Depending on the material’s design, when there is no pressure on QTC it offers no resistance and importantly consumes no power. Then, as the material is compressed the resistance increases in relation to the force applied to it. These features of the material are the key to its use in future touch screens devices.

QTC is developed by Peratech, a company based in the north east of England, which has just signed an agreement with Nissha, a Japanese company with its roots in printing, to apply QTC to the creation of touch screens for small devices (screens under 5.5 inches).

In addition to offering new capabilities to touch screens, QTC will also enable smaller touch screen devices because, unlike alternative touch screen technology, it does not require an air gap and can be applied in layers as thin as 10 micros.

While product lifecycles mean we are unlikely to see QTC touch screens on a significant number of smartphones in the immediate future, this is definitely a technology to watch.