About Freetouch



The Freetouch Story


We are a team of seasoned experience designers making interactive installations safer to use through advanced touchless technologies.

With the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, a new problem emerged for the interactive experience industry. It quickly became clear that fears of contracting disease from touching shared surfaces could jeopardize the effectiveness of millions of public-facing touchscreens globally. As a team with a long history of designing advanced touch-driven installations, we heard from clients worried about the safety of their shared displays. They all had the same question: how could they make their clients, customers, and visitors feel comfortable using these high-value (and significant-investment) interactive installations again?

Many in the industry had suggested providing PPE for safer interaction with touchscreens, but given global shortages it was clear that this solution couldn't scale. We also knew that retrofitting touchscreen experiences with gestural inputs would be expensive and time-consuming, requiring new hardware and significant redesign of the user interface. Turning off the systems was not an option, as it would mean squandering the valuable resources our clients had invested in developing.

As we struggled with this dilemma, we realized that the ubiquity of smartphones could hold a solution. We set out to develop contactless interaction software that would allow for control of touchscreens from personal phones. With a little prototyping and a lot of planning, our San Francisco team moved quickly from proof-of-concept to robust product in a matter of months. We are proud to offer a simple retrofit that requires a minimum of effort to install; we believe it delivers a better experience than all of the other proposed solutions to the problem. Most importantly, it gives our valued clients - and the countless other organizations who rely on touchscreen experiences - a way to quickly and easily make interactivity safer for anyone with a smartphone.