Building a Multi-touch Tabletop for Classrooms

This paper aims to build a compact multi-touch tabletop that can be easily integrated with a normal classroom desk to become a student touch desk. Various state-of-the-art multi-touch technologies are investigated. Based on the analysis of their multi-touch quality, physical characteristics and application requirements, the projected capacitive touch (PCT) technology based on ITO coatings is selected. To provide high quality display, a slim LED television is used and integrated with the PCT panel. A 32-inch dual-touch tabletop has been implemented and shown at BETT 2011. Compared with the potential competing systems such as 3M 32-inch multi-touch displays, this tabletop is more compact and its thickness is only half of the 3M display thickness. The contrast ratio and brightness are better. The cost of the tabletop hardware is about 1/4 of the price of a 3M 32-inch multi-touch display. The tabletop is being used in a secondary school and has received positive feedback from users.