For example, could the iPad or iPhone accurately detect the difference between conductive pieces of plastic in the following shapes?
IPad – Can the iPad detect the shape of a contact on its screen
ipadtouchscreen
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Best Answer
Edit
While it's still unlikely that such shape detection is possible (that would be so cool for boardgames or D&D maps or whatever), Ten One Design has successfully used private APIs to determine the size of the touch (which they refer to as pressure detection). http://youtu.be/OgTcyjzXfTg?t=32s shows it in action.
The touchscreen likely isn't sufficiently sensitive; there's a lot of very clever math going on behind the scenes to make it seems as smooth as it is. The actual resolution is something like 1/16 of an inch.But worse, as @Dan points out, it's not really detecting shapes that way, the signal is much more crude.