Every day, you tap, swipe, pinch, and scroll across a sheet of glass without giving it a second thought. Your phone somehow knows exactly where your finger is—even though you never actually touch the electronics underneath. So how can a perfectly solid piece of glass detect your touch with incredible accuracy?

In this episode, we explore the fascinating engineering behind capacitive touchscreens. We dive into electrical engineering, materials science, computer engineering, physics, and microelectronics to understand how invisible electric fields allow modern devices to sense your finger through glass in just milliseconds.

We examine conductive coatings, transparent electrodes, capacitive sensing, electric fields, mutual capacitance, touchscreen controllers, signal processing, multi-touch technology, and the software that transforms ti ...