The Children’s Museum of Houston is exploring how to integrate personal mobile technology into the museum experience. As a part of that, we purchased an iPad to explore its potential. Basically, that means I get to play with an iPad! Oh, and figure out the ways we can use it to interact with our visitors on a whole new level. So keep an eye out for me on the floor in the coming months with our iPad.

All that being said, I’ve done some experimentation with the iPad and was quite surprised the first time I discovered that you cannot use just a plain plastic stylus to write on its screen. When I looked up the specs, I discovered is that the iPad (as well as iPhone, iPod Touch, and many other touch-sensitive technologies) isn’t a real touch screen. It is, in fact, a Capacitive Sensor, meaning that the surface builds up an electrical charge. When you touch it with your finger, some of the charge flows into you and sensors under the glass detect that drop in charge at that location, thereby telling the device where you’ve touched it. So issue #1 is that the plastic is non-conductive so it will not reduce the charge. In fact, even wearing gloves will make it pretty much impossible for the device to detect you.

So what is a person dying to have a stylus to do? Well, you can make an aluminum foil stylus (that will conduct the electricity from the screen to you), but it needs to be pretty big given that the screen is meant to sense things the size of a finger and if you’re not careful you can scratch the glass. Fortunately, the folks at dsLabs have created a DIY stylus using anti-static socks so it is soft and dry, but it does take a little patience to cut and sew it together. Check it out here. And if you need a source for anti-static socks, dsLabs recommend this. And here’s a photo of another one: