Sound of touch: Touch Speakers

From expensive and unreliable touch-screen smartphones will soon be abandoned, clicking on use ... speaker system.

Note that a serious claim to the usual today resistive touch screens is their high cost - for their production processes used are too complicated and rare materials (such as indium oxide). Small project promises to revolutionize TouchDevice, over which runs a student at Cambridge, Jens Christensen (Jens Christensen) - incidentally, has already won him a prestigious engineering award ICT Pioneer.
Technology, on which he works, allows to determine the point of touch of a finger or stylus to the screen based on the data ... microphone. A key role is played the software extracts the required data from the noise, which fixes the microphone. Perhaps technology will implement using existing smartphones, without their essential improvements.
TouchDevice captures faint sounds that are created by the user clicking on the screen, and through special algorithms for localizing the clicked point. So far, he distinguishes touch with an accuracy of no more than 1-1,5 cm, but the improvement in resolution - the question is purely technical.
The main disadvantage remains the impossibility of handling "silent" action, which under the force of the usual modern touch screen - say, dragging objects. But the main advantage Christensen calls himself an opportunity to "transform not only the screen, and the entire surface of the phone in the sensor unit. And, of course, nothing prevents the transference of the same technology and other portable electronics, and even just on the wall at home.