History

Anyone with a real interest in buying this technology will have noticed that the core patent was issued in 1994 and should wonder what has happened in the meantime.

True Easel technology originally was developed as a touch screen, in answer to three problems with the resistive and capacitive touch screen technologies predominant at that time. Those technologies required that the display screen be covered with an “overlay” consisting of sheets of glass and/or plastic with highly reflective metallized or diffusing surfaces that dimmed, confused, and blurred the display images on the display underneath. The precision of those technologies was low and uneven. And finally, the cost of those technologies was high, particularly for large displays. Our technology answered all of those problems.

True Easel technology was licensed to a start-up company to be manufactured and marketed. The start-up company failed after never having gotten off to a good start and C F Systems recently recovered full control of the patent. We believe we fully understand the reasons for that failure and that they primarily resulted from targeting the technology to the wrong final market. You may judge for yourself.

Why did the start-up company fail? There are two primary reasons for this. One is that the start-up never achieved sufficient capitalization to properly do the job it needed to do. To address that problem we plan to sell full rights to the patents to a large company with an interest in getting into this market area with a unique technology and with the financial backing to make a go of it in such a high profile, high volume market. The second reason for the failure is that the technology had two weak points and the start-up consistently worked marketing strategies that played directly into those weak points.

Rather than targeting new markets which the technological superiorities of our device could open and which could not be challenged by existing technologies, the start-up targeted head-on lower price-based competition with existing touch screens in markets where they were already well-established. In particular, they targeted applications like kiosks and gaming machines. This is a camera-based technology and is naturally affected to some degree by extremes in lighting. Although a kiosk company typically can and will place most kiosks where this is not a problem, they will want to place a few units in atriums, building foyers, and the like where there is sometimes rapidly changing direct sunlight. Such a company is not interested in a technology that generally works really well but fails in 5% of its locations, even if the technology costs less. The other weak point of the technology is that when implemented for finger touch it has no inherent means of detecting actual touch – the cameras detect the finger before it reaches the display surface. Either a secondary device must detect touch – as a pen can – or some convention must be used to simulate detection of touch. There are easily learned techniques that do this quite well, but the key word is “learned.” Kiosk and gaming machine users must be able to use the device with no training at all. A pen is not practical for kiosk or gaming usage and the start-up company refused to use other secondary devices for detecting touch.

It has been the C F Systems position from the start that the proper market for this device is on the personal computer of an individual user. In that setting the (literally) few minutes required to learn how to use the interface are barely noticed and for critical usage it is possible, in fact desirable, to use a pen input device to give full control over detection of touch and pressure. An individual user will not place a computer where there is interference from direct sunlight for the simple reason that it will cause him the same eye strain that tends to confuse the device. LCD displays in particular cannot even be seen in the sort of lighting that interferes with the True Easel performance.

Targeting the individual user PC also allows some simple – and patentable – improvements that reduce the size and cost of the cameras. These same changes coupled with some associated implementation changes have the side effect of reducing the sensitivity to interfering light by several orders of magnitude, desirable even if not really needed for this application.