Floating touch™, that lets you interact with the phone without even touching it. This unique user experience lets you control parts of the user interface (UI) by simply letting your finger hover above the screen. Floating touch™ enables the phone to register your finger up to 20mm above the screen.

1. Floating Touch

2. What Is Floating Touch??
 Floating touch™, that lets you interact with the
phone without even touching it. This unique user
experience lets you control parts of the user
interface (UI) by simply letting your finger hover
above the screen.
 Floating touch™ enables the phone to register your
finger up to 20mm above the screen.

3.  This makes it possible to detect not only the screen
coordinates that you are pointing at, but also your
finger’s distance from the screen.

5. What Actually The Floating Touch Is?

6.  Current smartphones use capacitive touchscreens.
Manufacturers can use two types of sensors for such
– mutual and self capacitance. The former allows
multi-touch, while self capacitance sensors do not.
 Sony uses both sensors simultaneously to create
this hovering effect. Mutual capacitance is used for
regular touch actions, and self capacitive sensors
are activated when the Floating Touch feature is in
use. This is what creates the “shadowing” effect (or
highlighting).

7.  There are two types of capacitive sensors used for
touch screens, mutual capacitance and self-
capacitance. Mutual capacitance makes multi-touch
detection possible. Self-capacitance generates a
stronger signal than mutual capacitance, which
allows accurate detection of the finger further away
from the sensors. However, with self-capacitance it
is not possible to perform multi-touch detection due
to an effect called “ghosting”.

8. Mutual capacitance Self capacitance
 With mutual capacitance, each
intersection of a line in the
illustration above forms a parallel
plate capacitor. This means that
each intersection is a
sensor, which allows for true multi-
touch since the position of each
finger can be exactly measured.
However, because the area of the
intersection between two lines is
very small, the electrical field of the
sensor is also small. Since the field
of the sensor is so small, the signal
from it has a low strength. This
makes it poor for sensing very
small signals, like when the user’s
finger hovers above the screen.
 Self capacitance and the ghosting
effect
Looking at the graphs above, each X or
Y line as whole is a capacitive
sensor, in the case of self capacitance.
This means that the sensors are larger
compared to the mutual capacitance
described above. The large sensors
create strong signals, which make it
possible to detect the user’s finger up
to 20 mm above the screen. When a
finger is on or just above the
screen, the nearest sensor lines are
activated (X1, Y0). If two fingers are
detected, ghosting positions occurs
since four lines activated. As you can
see in the graph above, this gives four
possible touch positions (all four
activated intersections of

10. Combining self and mutual capacitance
to allow floating touch™
 Floating touch™ is solved by running both mutual
capacitance and self capacitance, on the same
touch screen, at the same time. Mutual capacitance
is used for the normal touch sensing, including multi-
touch. By running self-capacitance at the same
time, we can detect a finger above the surface of the
screen. However, since the floating touch™
technology depends on self capacitance, it is not
possible to perform multi-touch gestures with the
fingers hovering above the screen. However, multi-
touch will work fine for the normal touch gestures on
the screen.

11.  Do you think floating touch is a must-have
feature for future smartphones?

12. Thank You

 Made By
 Sanchit Malhotra
 10 ITU 063