But perhaps not for long.

As PatentBolt saw, Google has applied for a patent on touch control built into the back side of future Android-based phones and tablets, which means that you could turn the page of an ebook, flip to the next song, or pause a video just by tapping or swiping the back of your device.

That all sounds simple, but the challenge lies in distinguishing normal holding contact from intentional touches to control the device or app. Google’s technology will apparently ignore spurious contact and only react to intentional, sustained contact.

Ars Technica notes that Apple also filed a patent for touch controls on the back of a device back in 2006. In Apple’s case, the device in question is an iPad, but no shipping device using this technology has yet seen the light of day.

Or maybe even your keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft Research is always working on cool new features, and based on a video Microsoft just released, it seems clear that the next version of Kinect will be able to better recognize hands, hand positioning, and hand gestures, effectively letting you control your Xbox — and your PC — with just the equipment god gave you, right out of the box.

Here’s the demo video:

The company has a long ways to go, however, to catch up to Leap Motion.

Leap Motion is essentially a $80 Kinect for your computer, which is 200 times more sensitive than the current Xbox 360′s motion-sensing camera. You can use it to control virtually anything you might want to on your computers, and Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise. It tracks both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second, detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

We have no idea that the prototype Xbox controller is that precise: The video does not show individual finger control, and the screen shows 30 frames per second. (Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have greater capability — Microsoft is certainly keeping some secrets.) But the Xbox is designed as a living room system, so it will likely have a much wider field of sensitivity and a much greater capability to recognize multiple people and multiple hands.

And note that the video says this is Kinect for Windows. Right now, that’s aimed at commercial markets such as in-store demoing solutions. But that’s just a tiny little sideways shuffle from being available for the PC in your kitchen, which you could then control from anywhere, no matter if your hands are full, or clean.

Really, the video hints at the future: Controllers for everything, in the air, hardware-free.

That’s amazing, and it’s no longer science fiction or a Tom Cruise movie.

Hat tip: Engadget

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Touch feedback makes a user interface better by providing confirmation, enabling a sense of realism, and creating richer communication.

That’s the view of Immersion, the maker of haptics, or electronics that deliver touch feedback — such as a vibration or the sense of a button being pushed — through touchscreens and other devices. Today, it is launching a way to get more touch-feedback technology into more devices, mainly by designing user interface experiences that device makers can easily adopt.

The company has shipped more than 550 million TouchSense products.

Founded in 1993, Immersion always has a tough sell because its touch technology adds cost to a system, and you can’t always describe why it makes the experience of using a device better.

But the San Jose, Calif.-based company argues that mobile communications devices can feel lifeless, isolated, and detached if they don’t offer feedback to the user.

“Everyone is familiar with the idea of telepresence, the notion that while we’re talking on a phone, we create a shared audio space with others. With Tactile Presence, we have extended the idea of a shared space to include the sense of touch,” said Immersion’s Chris Ullrich, vice president of user experience. “The sense of touch is fundamental, emotive, and creates a strong sense of connection. With Tactile Presence, OEMs [original equipment manufacturers, or gadget makers] can harness this powerful sense to create more satisfying mobile telepresence experiences.”

The company will be demonstrating its new Tactile Presence and Integrated Themes solutions at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, next week.

Immersion still hasn’t sold Apple on the idea, but the Android operating system from Google has supported haptics since the 2.1 version of the software.

A wide range of devices use them. The Samsung Galaxy S III, the Samsung Note 2, and the Samsung Note 10.1 use haptics. So does the LG Optimus 4. NEC, Fujitsu, and Panasonic have also adopted haptics.

Game makers such as Rockstar Games, Sega, Gamevil, and Handy Games have tapped touch feedback. Several car makers have used haptics in instrument controls. And game peripheral makers such as Razer have also adopted Immersion’s technology.

When it comes to confirmation, Immersion says getting feedback in your finger improves your confidence that you have performed an action such as pushed a button. It also improves accuracy, usability, and intuitive interaction.

Realism is another important result of haptics. A button feels like a button when you push it. It creates the illusion of physical reality in a device that is trying to deliver an illusion to you for the sake of entertainment. And once you interact with haptics, you can recall the effects from the memory of the touch feedback alone, Immersion argues.

Immersion believes that brand messages can be delivered through touch. Intel’s famous computer sounds became familiar to people from its commercials. But the same kind of brand recognition could be delivered through the unique feel of an object as well. Brand makers will be able to tap this technology starting in the second quarter, Immersion said.

In a design style dubbed skeuomorphic, Immersion says that product designers at Samsung created a water-like effect using sounds of droplets and visuals of those droplets hitting the water. You can enhance that feeling by adding a sense of touch to the feel of the drops as they splash in the water. Customers who tested the effect said they could “feel the water” even though they weren’t touching real water.

And when it comes to rich communications — like communicating one lover’s touch to another through a phone — haptics can work wonders. You could, for instance, create an app where you can tap on the phone and the person on the other side of the phone call could feel the vibrations on the phone. Immersion calls these effects “touch trails.” This kind of “tactile presence” technology will be available to gadget makers in the second half of 2013.

To make it easier for developers, Immersion provides an applications programming interface (API) to implement the effects in smartphones or tablets.

Over time, Immersion’s technology has gotten less expensive. And the company says that haptics effects consume only about 2 percent of a smartphone’s processing power, as long as the device uses Immersion’s TouchSense embedded software. Without that software, the haptics use about 7 percent of the processing power.

ChromeOS, which runs mini laptops from Acer, Asus, and Samsung among other partners, may soon follow Windows 8 in making touch a core part of the laptop user experience. According to a report from Taiwan, Google is testing the waters with a small run of touch-compatible Chromebooks, to be released under Google’s own Nexus brand.

According to the report, Compal will be providing components for 20 million units, set to start shipping late this year. That’s a large number for a device with limited commercial success so far — Google has not released sales figures for any generation of Chromebook yet.

Chromebooks, which you can buy from Google directly as well as from partners such as Best Buy, feature an operating system based on the Chrome browser. With minimal local storage and intelligence, the laptops — netbooks, really — are essentially cloud devices, booting in seconds, needing little or no configuration, and plugging users directly into the Google ecosystem of search, docs, and other tools, plus anything else online. They’re cheap as well, priced at between $200 and $500, or leasable, starting at $30/month.

Adding touch may be a sign that Google plans to launch a convertible device similar to Lenovo’s Windows 8 devices where the screen flips, rotates, or even detaches from the keyboard. Or Google may simply be experimenting with the existing clamshell devices. Either way, price will go up as component costs for touchscreens get added into the mix.

Any device launch is not likely until sometime well into 2013.

Hat tip: PCmag

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft released the final build of Windows 8, dubbed “RTM,” to developers and manufacturers last week. So how will it work on your desktop when it lands on Oct. 26?

Based on my tests, not very well. In fact, if you’re still using a desktop PC, you’re probably going to dislike Windows 8.

Microsoft has designed Windows 8 to work across almost all devices, with the exception of smartphones, a nearly one-size-fits-all approach to the operating system. That’s a marked contrast to Apple’s decision to use iOS for tablets and phones, and OS X on desktops.

On top of this, Windows 8 will share a kernel with Windows Phone 8 to make it easier for developers to create apps and games that work for both.

Unfortunately, Windows 8 doesn’t work equally well for all devices. How I work on a desktop is going to be different from how I work on a tablet. Using my fingers to navigate through Windows is a wholly different experience than using a mouse to click on things.

With Windows 8, Microsoft favors tablets, touchscreens, and laptops with modern touchpads. It works very well for these kinds of computers. Traditional desktops with a keyboard and mouse, on the other hand, have been left in the dust.

Desktop issues

True, a major part of the OS is devoted to the traditional Windows desktop. The desktop view is there if you need to run older Windows applications, or if you just want a familiar-looking interface.

But the desktop view isn’t what Microsoft is pushing. Much like Apple’s Mac App Store, there will be a Windows 8 Store available for downloading the new full-screen apps Microsoft is betting heavily on. (Notably, the store won’t offer older Windows programs at all.) These new Windows 8-style apps appear on your computer’s Start screen and run in a full-screen mode without menu bars or toolbars. Microsoft has referred to its Windows Phone and Windows 8 interfaces as “Metro”, but it has ditched the term and not yet given us a replacement, so I’ll refer to it as the “modern” design. Indeed, much of the focus for Windows 8 is on the sleek Start screen (image above).

Now let’s dig into some of desktop issues. (Let us know what other issues you see for the desktop in the comments.)

Dead mouse — Windows 8 isn’t meant for mice — it’s meant for fingers. The spread-out Start screen is more ideal for tapping than clicking, whereas the Start menu in Windows 7 is crammed into a tighter space to make it easier to click individual items. Scrolling using your mouse now moves the screen left and right instead of up and down. Mouse scrolling can be problematic inside some modern apps. Parts of the Bing Weather app, for example, are meant to be scrolled up and down and can interrupt you. (Check out this video for an illustration of this problem.) Basically, scrolling through apps with your fingers is much easier.

Right-clicking — When you right click your mouse in Windows 7, a menu pops up next to where you clicked to give you more options. Right clicking a picture, for example, brings up options like Preview, Cut, Copy, or Delete. Right-clicking a program on the desktop Taskbar gives you lots of helpful options too. But right-click menus go out the window in Windows 8, unless you’re using an old-style desktop app. Now, instead of a menu of options appearing right where you clicked, a limited number of options appear at the bottom of the screen. You now need to move your mouse to the bottom of the screen to select an option, and this gets incredibly tedious in modern apps and on the Start screen.

Small displays — The modern-style Start screen and modern apps look great on tablet screens and small displays, but they can get a little messy on a desktop PC with a large monitor. Modern apps aren’t optimized for larger resolutions, although Microsoft makes it possible to scale apps. Microsoft is preparing Windows 8 for the world where 10- to 13-inch monitors are the norm, as ZDNet points out. Thankfully, Windows 8 at least includes decent multi-monitor support for power desktop users with two monitors.

Full-screen apps — Windows 8 already has some killer apps. Unfortunately, these apps are almost all better suited for tablets than desktops. There’s no “X” in the corner to exit apps in a single click like you can in Windows 7. Instead you have to click the very top of an app and drag it to the bottom of a screen to close it — an easy gesture on a touchscreen, but a laborious exercise with a mouse. It’s also not as easy to switch between these modern apps as it was with old-style desktop apps and the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Modern app switching — To switch between open modern apps using a mouse, you need to hover in the top left corner and then drag down to see the programs on the full left side of the screen. Only modern apps are shown in this lineup of open apps, not desktop apps. So if you want to switch between a modern app and an older desktop app, you need to go into the desktop and then select the desktop app you want. A two-step process has replaced the old one-step switch.

Screen splitting — Another issue with modern apps is the space allocated to them on the screen. When I work, I often divide my screen in two equal-sized windows. Modern apps don’t do this. You can only allocate roughly 25 percent of the screen to one app while the other 75 percent is taken up by another. This layout is not conducive to multitasking. Thankfully, you can still do a 50-50 split, or whatever tiling you’re used to, in the desktop area.

Hidden apps — It can be hard to find programs meant for the old-style Windows desktop if you don’t know where to go. From the desktop screen, you cannot launch desktop apps that aren’t already pinned to the Taskbar. That’s because the Start button is gone. Let’s say you use the Calculator app often. To access it, you have to go to the Start screen, right-click the screen, go to the bottom right-hand corner and select All Apps, then select Calculator. Once Calculator is open on the Desktop, you need to pin it to the Taskbar or you have to go through all of those steps again the next time you want it.

Internet Explorer tabs — This last point is minor, but the modern version of Internet Explorer 10 has no visible tabs. If you want to switch between tabs, you have to right click inside Internet Explorer to reveal your open tabs. I rely heavily on tabs to get my work done, so if you need them like I do, you’ll have to use old-style Internet Explorer from the desktop. While I don’t use Internet Explorer, it’s what comes available out of the box and many folks still use it. Alternately, you can download and use Google Chrome, which includes tabs in its modern app.

Tablet and touchscreen benefits

In its current form, Windows 8 is a tablet-centric OS. The interface works best on tablets, and we can’t wait to see it running on devices like the Microsoft Surface.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 are different beasts, and workflow is different when you have to deal with the Start screen versus the Start button. In Windows 7, I can do everything I can think of from a single screen. I can launch apps from the Taskbar or the Start button, I can easily re-size all my apps in different windows as needed, and everything feels optimized for an external mouse and keyboard.

Windows 8 requires me to switch between the desktop and the Start screen, which feels unnecessary. It shouldn’t take me extra steps if I choose to use a mouse, and that leads me to believe that Microsoft wants us to use tablets or ultrabooks instead of desktops. It also wants us to use full-screen modern apps instead of windowed desktop apps. (One exception: Microsoft Office 2013, which you launch from the Desktop but is more touch-friendly than past versions.)

The problems listed above show Microsoft is willing to alienate desktop users in favor of an interface that embraces touch screens and trackpads. Many businesses still rely on desktops for their workers, and it’s plausible that Windows 7 will remain the top choice for those businesses. That said, companies could adopt Windows 8 for tablets and hybrid laptops they want to deploy to workers.

After spending much time with Windows 8, I can’t recommend it for advanced desktop users unless Microsoft makes interface tweaks to make it more desktop-friendly. I don’t plan to upgrade my desktop from Windows 7 to 8 at launch because Windows 7 works so well. After several years of usage, I consider Windows 7 the best desktop OS ever, and I prefer it to Apple’s also-great Mountain Lion OS.

I expect Windows 7, with its 630 million licenses sold, will remain an incredibly popular OS for the next 10 years — just like Windows XP.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Synaptics announced today that it is releasing three new touch-focused technologies for laptops and other mobile devices: ForcePad, ThinTouch, and ClearPad. The new components are timed to complement upcoming Windows 8 and Window 8 RT launches.

ThinTouch is an ultrathin keyboard for super-slim laptops or ultrabooks, and ClearPad is a component to enable touch sensitivity on screens as large at 17″.

But the most interesting new technology is ForcePad, which is a touchpad that incorporates variable force detection … meaning that laptop manufacturers will soon be able to build in functionalities that can react differently based on how hard you push that pad.

Synaptics thinks it will be a big deal, saying the technology “literally redefines the human-computer interface.”

That’s a rather magnitudinous statement, but it certainly does add another dimension to touch, which currently has just two factors on most platforms: location and longevity.

Drawing is an obvious use case, but others exist. Setting sensitivities to ignore spurious touches would be one, and using a soft tap to select a document and a hard tap to open it might be another.

ClearPad is expected to ship in late 2012, while ForcePad is currently scheduled for a mid-2013 launch date. ThinTouch is in testing with PC manufacturers, but Synaptics did not release a shipping date.

Image credit: Realinemedia/ShutterStock

Each year, touch technology is getting better and better, but device engineers and consumers are also getting more demanding and have no tolerance for flaws in touchscreens. So the San Jose, Calif.-based company is unveiling its next generation of maXTouch S series of controllers for touchscreens — the chips that determine how quickly and precisely the screens react when you swipe your finger across them. The chips enable screens up to 17 inches diagonal that can track the movement of an unlimited number of fingers at the same time.

The chips work with smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, e-readers and other applications. Atmel has three versions of the chips that work for everything from a 4.3-inch screen smartphone to a 17-inch tablet running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The chips enable smaller devices and form factors, responsiveness, higher-quality displays, great battery life, and multiple ways of capturing user input, such as a pen or a finger.

“We’re trying to deliver on the wish list that designers have always wanted in a touchscreen,” said Sherif Hanna, tablet touchscreens marketing manager at Atmel, in an interview. “The devices still don’t feel and behave as they should.”

The S series chips have SlimSensor technology, which enables a thinner and lighter screen without sacrificing responsiveness, touch fidelity or battery life. The chips can eliminate display noise and still operate twice as fast in responsiveness than previous chips. Since the touch sensors can be 60 percent smaller in these new chips, system designers can reduce the thickness of a screen by more than one millimeter. That is a huge reduction, considering some phones are only seven millimeters thick.

Atmel is also adding a new feature for the S series chips: maXCharger technology, which blends analog circuits and mathematical formulas that enable battery chargers that are much more efficient. The technology eliminates false touches — where the screen reacts to an unintentional touch. It can also suppress severe electrical noise spikes, making the devices about three times more responsive to touch. This means your device won’t get messed up when you plug a low-quality charger into it, something that happens a lot now that many devices use universal serial bus (USB) chargers.

Production versions of the maXTouch S series chips will be available in the first quarter. For the unlimited touch maXTouch chips, this is the third generation of chips. Prior versions were launched in 2011 and 2009. Rivals include Cypress Semiconductor, Synaptics and a number of Asian competitors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enflick, the Canadian creator of popular apps like TextNow and PingChat, is taking a big step forward today with the launch of Touch, a new mobile messaging platform to help you keep in touch with your closest friends and family.

Yes, that sounds a bit similar to Path, the year-old mobile social network that recently received a major update. But Touch, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, is more focused on real-time chat rather than posting updates. It’s about active communication with your close friends.

And Touch has one other major advantage over its better-funded competitor: a massive pre-existing user base. The company says it has 21.5 million worldwide users on PingChat and TextNow, and Touch will roll out as an update for 13 million existing PingChat users.

Enflick co-founder and CEO Derek Ting tells us that Touch will completely replace the existing PingChat network — which makes sense, since Touch is an evolved form of that app. Like PingChat, you can have quick text conversations with your friends and share photos, but Touch will also let you easily keep track of all of your friends’ updates in typical social network fashion.

The Touch app looks attractive (though perhaps a bit too similar to Path), and it lets you easily move friends in and out of conversations to make group chats easier. Like all mobile messaging apps, it lets you know if your messages have been delivered and read, as well as when your friends are typing.

Still, Enflick has a long road ahead, as there are plenty of other messaging solutions on the market. And when it comes to keeping in touch with close friends, many are already praising Path’s slick new interface and life-tracking features.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Enflick recently raised $1 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, the Menlo Ventures Talent fund, and both Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s managers (not surprising, given the massive teen demographic for free texting services).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has big plans for Windows 8′s touch interface, but at the moment, those plans don’t include Adobe Flash.

The company said today that Windows 8 will include two versions of Internet Explorer, but its “Metro style” touch-specific version will not support plugins like Adobe Flash.

Instead, like Apple, Microsoft is betting on HTML5.

“For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free,” wrote Dean Hachamovitch, head of Microsoft’s IE team, in a blog post. “The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.”

Hachamovitch continued his reasoning further, saying that keeping Metro-style IE plug-in free “improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. … Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro-style UI.”

This sort of reasoning closely echoes former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who publicly shunned Flash in April 2010 when he wrote that it will never run on iPhones, iPods and iPads and that “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.”

Both Jobs and Hachamovitch appear to agree that HTML5 content is the future when it comes to consuming the web on mobile and touch devices. Tablets and smartphones have seen staggering growth the past few years, with several more years of growth ahead predicted by Gartner, Current Analyis, and other research firms. It’s important for the web to be tailored properly for these low-powered devices.

Regardless of most mobile browser incompatibility (Android does support some Flash content), many websites still use Flash to the operate and to work on mobile devices they must deploy native applications. One recent example is Turntable.fm, which uses Flash plugin to run streaming music through traditional web browsers but offers a native iOS application to access the service on the iPhone.

Both versions of IE10 on Windows 8 will use the same rendering engine, but people that want to use Windows 8 but need or want access to Flash-enabled sites will still be able to run on the edition of IE10 targeted at desktops and laptops.

Do you think Microsoft made the right move in removing plugins from Metro-style Internet Explorer 10?

While displays aren’t nearly as sexy as the tablets and smartphones they go into, they’re an interesting market to observe because they show what happens when the entire manufacturing world pursues a hot trend. Sometimes the window for making profits in such a market is only open for a nanosecond.

Revenue for touchscreens were $4.3 billion in 2009 and $7.1 billion in 2010 on a worldwide basis. They are projected to grow 90 percent to $13.4 billion in 2011. By 2017, the market will nearly double to $23.9, according to market researcher Display Search, which puts on the Emerging Display Technologies conference.

“There are lots of opportunities in the touchscreen market,” said Jennifer Colegrove, vice president of emerging display technology at Display Search. “The market is doubling this year and will double again by 2017.”

Profit margins run around 5 to 15 percent, which is low but is far higher than many of the other profitless and cutthroat markets for electronic components. The overall $100 billion display market often has a negative profit margin, as most of the companies lose money in severe price competition.

That’s why there are now 190 touchscreen suppliers in the worldwide market, many of which started producing in just the last couple of years, Colegrove said. Within the hottest part of the market, the projected capacitive screens, there are 82 suppliers, compared to 58 in 2010 and 27 in 2009. But as in any market, the touchscreen field is dominated by a small number of companies. The top suppliers include Taiwan’s TPK, Taiwan’s Wintek, Japan’s Nissha and Korea’s Melfas.

The current projected capacitive technology got its start in 1965, when an English researcheer, E.A. Johnson, created a lab display. Sam Hurst, founder of Elographics, commercialized the technology in 1977. The technology consists of a layer of glass, or a protective cover, that sits atop a touch sensor layer. That layer is coated with a matrix of overlapping wires made from a transparent conducting material. Those wires connect to a controller chip that receives the data and sends it to the phone or tablet’s main processor. The touch sensor layer is sandwiched in between the protective cover and the display panel, usually a liquid crystal display or organic light emitting diode (OLED) display. When a finger comes down on the cover, it distorts the screen’s electrical field, resulting in a measurable change in capacitance, or the ability to store a charge. Then a signal gets sent to the controller chip.

A variety of players in the ecosystem are benefiting. Atmel’s maXTouch display controllers have become critical parts of touchscreens that need to detect multiple finger touches and need to reject electronic noise and false touches from palms. Atmel has seen its display controller revenues grow to $150 million in 2010, and it expects $300 million in revenue in 2011.

Of course, the market is fraught with risks, as any commodity hardware market is. If there’s a slowdown in demand, or a new technology emerges, the existing suppliers could face a big drop in demand. Makers of resistive screens have moved from 64 to 91 in the past two years, but the size of that market has shrunk.

There are 11 categories within the touchscreen market, but projected capacitive screens have taken over about 70 percent of the market. Resistive screens held the leading market share for many years, but the higher-quality projected capacitive screens took the lead in 2010.

There are 10 ways to build projected capacitive screens. Suppliers with the simplest designs tend to be the most successful, since complex screens are more expensive to build. Technical challenges include eliminating noise so that touch gestures can be detected more accurately, reducing power consumption of the displays, handling the issue of sweaty fingers, and the need to make the devices both thin and strong. A German company, Schott, showed off a new kind of glass called “Xensation Cover” at the event that was both strong and bendable.

Products such as the Apple iPhone and the iPad use capacitive touch displays. Smartphones are a huge consumer, but tablets are coming on strong. There are now an estimated 90 tablet computers in the market, Colegrove said, and the unit sales for touch-based tablets will hit 70 million units in 2011. The market is expected to skyrocket to 360 million units by 2017. Other new users for touchscreens include eBooks, navigation devices, car displays, cameras, multifunction printers, game consoles and other appliances.

The touchscreen market is still in its early days, in terms of the boom inspired by the iPhone. But changes could come in many ways. The more E Ink displays for eBook readers take off, the more there could be a real alternative to projected capacitive screens. And Colegrove noted that Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 game console is a new kind of user interface that could catch on. It requires a very different kind of sensor technology that can detect gestures where there is no touchscreen. If that kind of technology takes off, then it could cause a big disruption for touchscreen makers.

“It is a very low-cost technology and it could be a breakthrough for a number of different products,” Colegrove said.