Apple has found a trick to make its touchscreen devices more responsive even when wet

The youngest? It’s worth a drink ! Your cousin’s Bac results? Same. But the touch, especially not! Water and touch don’t mix, and yet sometimes you don’t really have a choice. To avoid these moments of loneliness where a touch surface no longer reacts, Apple would work on a solution. He patented it.

Please note, this is not a scoop: touch has changed the way we interact with the world and the objects, connected for the most part, that we use on a daily basis, whether on a smartphone, a connected watch, or even earphones.

Being able to interact with an electronic product with a simple touch makes life and our user experience more fluid. However, for those who have tried to unlock their iPhone with rain-wet fingers, or to control their sweaty AirPods during an intensive outing, the disappointment is strong. Touch interfaces do not like water. And that’s of course without even mentioning the fact that you will very often have to take off your gloves (or have compatible gloves) in winter to enjoy touch. In winter, when it’s cold, the situation often comes down to taking the risk of losing a finger or not responding to an urgent message…

Ultrasound to the rescue

Apple is therefore experimenting with different technologies to try to solve this problem. According to a patent, which was published yesterday by the American Office, the American giant’s engineering teams would turn to the use of ultrasound to help touchscreen.
This technology would in fact be less disturbed by the presence of liquid on the touch surfaces, or of insulating surfaces between a finger and a touch surface.

In addition to being less subject to these hazards, this would also make it possible to refine the general operation of the touch screen, by reducing, in particular, the number of false positives. That is, when you touch the control surface unintentionally, by accident.

Nevertheless, Apple takes great care to explain that ultrasound is not a perfect solution, and that it must succeed in reducing, eliminating and/or rejecting parasitic ultrasonic reflections.
This is one of the objectives of the technologies presented in the patent. Apple would succeed in avoiding these misinterpretations by notably concentrating the ultrasonic waves in one direction only, guiding them through a particular type of transducer, cylindrical in shape. The perfect shape to be slipped into a branch of AirPods, for example.

For headphones, and more?

And, in fact, the illustrations in the patent seem to focus on headphones: AirPods Max or Pro. That’s good, the AirPods Pro 2 should be on the market by the end of the year, so we begin to hope that this technology will be integrated, even if it seems a little fast. Especially since filing a patent does not mean formalizing a technology. Nothing says that we will see it one day in a product.

In addition, Apple has apparently considered

ultrasonic technology for fingerprint recognition on iPhones some time ago, before abandoning this path, which a priori did not give him complete satisfaction. However, we must admit that we would really appreciate seeing Apple slipping an ultrasonic solution into the Watch. The American giant’s connected watch is a very good companion for everyday sports activities, and it would benefit from seeing its screen usable even when the fingers and the screen are wet. We’re thinking of you triathlete friends… or even just swimmers.

Source :

Patently Apple