Three Types of Touch screen gloves The three main types of touchscreens are capacitive, resistive and surface acoustic wave. Capacitive touchscreens are made of a glass panel with a thin metallic layer on top. A small electrical current is constantly flowing through this top layer, and your finger interrupts the current when you touch the screen. A resistive touchscreen has a glass panel with two very thin metallic layers on top, which are held apart by spacers. A layer of scratch-proof material covers the metallic layers and protects them. One of the metallic layers conducts electricity, while the other resists it. When you touch the screen, the pressure from your finger causes the conductive and resistive layers to touch each other, which changes the electrical current. Surface acoustic wave touchscreens have two transducers that send signals to each other across a series of reflectors within the glass surface. If you touch the screen, the device's processor is able to determine exactly where the signal between the two transducers was interrupted. The Advantages of Touch screen gloves Each of the three types of touchscreen has advantages and disadvantages. Because surface acoustic wave touchscreens don't have any metallic layers on top of the screen's glass surface, 100 percent of the light that the device produces is able to shine through the screen. This makes for the clearest picture of the three types of touchscreen. However, the series of reflectors can only pinpoint 1 small point of contact at a time, making popular features like pinch-to-zoom impossible and causing problems for people with large fingers. Resistive touchscreens can perform pinch-to-zoom and will work fine for large-fingered people, but their two metallic layers block about 25 percent of the light coming from the device, significantly reducing picture quality. Capacitance touchscreens, on the other hand, perform touch-to-zoom just as well as resistive touchscreens while only using one metallic layer, which allows almost 90 percent of the light to shine through and creates a picture quality that is noticeably better than resistive touchscreens. The combination of high functionality and high picture quality makes capacitance touchscreens the most popular choice for tablets and smartphones.