Have you ever tried to control a touchscreen while wearing gloves? Depending on the type of touchscreen, it may not work. Some types of touchscreens only work with a bare finger. If you wear gloves, they won’t register your touch commands. You can only control them with a bare and ungloved finger. With that said, there are a few possible solutions that may allow you to control a touchscreen while wearing gloves.
Try Thinner Gloves
Thin gloves are more likely to work with touchscreens than thick gloves. Projected capacitive touchscreens, for instance, often support the use of thin gloves but not thick gloves. If your gloves are thick, they’ll create electrical resistance between your finger and the touchscreen’s display interface. Thin gloves, conversely, create minimal resistance. Electricity will be able to flow from the touchscreen display interface to your finger. Therefore, you may be able to control a projected capacitive touchscreen if you have thin gloves.
Of course, other capacitive touchscreens typically don’t work with any gloves. Surface capacitive touchscreens explicitly require the use of a bare finger. If you have a projected capacitive touchscreen, though, you may able to control it while wearing thin gloves.
Switch to Touchscreen Gloves
Another idea is to switch to touchscreen gloves. Touchscreen gloves live up to their namesake by supporting touchscreen devices. Also known as capacitive gloves, they contain conductive material embedded in the fingertips.
Touchscreen gloves are designed to work with capacitive touchscreens. They’ll mimic the characteristics of a bare finger by allowing electricity to flow from the capacitive touchscreen’s display interface to your finger. Electricity will flow through the conductive fingertips so that the capacitive touchscreen registers your touch commands.
Choose a Resistive Touchscreen
When all else fails, you can choose a resistive touchscreen to use while wearing gloves. Resistive touchscreens work with all types of objects. You can control them using a bare finger, a stylus or a gloved finger.
Resistive touchscreens are comprised of multiple layers, each of which contains electrodes. The layers are separated by air or inert gas. Performing a touch command will force the top layer into the bottom layer. When the layers’ electrodes touch each other, a touch event is registered is that area. As a result, you can wear gloves to control a resistive touchscreen. There are different types of resistive touchscreens, but they all support the use of gloves.
