Week 3: Airbar

I was browsing Reddit a few weeks ago and I saw a post about the Airbar. It's made by a company called Neonode and they claim it can turn any laptop screen into a touchscreen. I don't have one but I found it interesting and potentially useful for anyone that prefers to use a touchscreen but doesn't have a laptop with one. The Airbar is not currently available in Canada but it costs $80 on amazon.com. The price is on the high end in terms of input devices but it is much cheaper than it can cost to upgrade to a laptop with a touchscreen (ex. Dell XPS 13 without a touchscreen is $300 than the Dell XPS 13 with a touchscreen).

The Airbar offers something that is not seen much on laptops. Modularity. Most laptops come as a complete package without much room for hardware modifications. This product is a way to add an external feature to the laptop that can be easily removed when not in use. It comes with magnets for easily attaching and detaching, and it only needs a USB port to function.

Unlike a regular touchscreen, the Airbar doesn't use resistive touch technology. Instead, it uses a light sensor to detect the distance from your finger to the sensor and calculate where it is positioned on the screen. As a result, you can use it with gloves or other objects, not just your fingers. 

The downside of a light sensor is the precision. It needs to be lined up correctly to work, and may not fit every laptop. The Airbar website also says it supports touch gestures. However, since the light sensor goes on the bottom of the screen, multi-touch gestures might not work very well. If you have two fingers on the screen (one on top of the other), it might not recognize it properly.

Even though this product might not be for everyone, I think that this technology can be very useful in the future. Touchscreens could be a lot thinner if they are just a regular screen with a light sensor on the bottom. TV screens could become touchscreens with something like this. There are a lot of possibilities, it's up to tech companies to find a good use for it.

Bibliography:
http://www.air.bar/
https://www.amazon.com/Neonode-Airbar-15-6-Display-touch/dp/B01N3MHMSF/
http://www.dell.com/ca/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR5r1EfvheI