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The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Feb 13, 2006 12:00 PM
from the please-let-me-have-one dept.
Input Devices Hardware
LithiumX writes "This morning I saw a video demonstration of the most interesting input technology I've seen for a long time. This is a touch-screen that accepts inputs from multiple (I saw at least 8) points at once. It seems very responsive, the display is large and of decent resolution, and they actually wrote software to take advantage of it. It appears to be entirely research at the moment. I'd offer up organs for one of these things."
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  • Which in turn look a lot like Apple recycling their iPod scrollwheel and Synaptics double-finger gestures.
  • Didn't we see Apple patent [slashdot.org] this sort of thing recently? Can anyone describe how this patent may or may not apply to the above demo?
  • I bet you I could get a hold of one, whats your bloodtype ?

    Just kidding but that is seriously cool, and I dont say that often.

    I'd pay 2,500 for that Way before I would shell it out for a plasma TV....
  • The satellite imagery & topographic maps are the user navigating NASA World Wind [nasa.gov]. Way cool.

  • The Exploratorium had an exhibit like that (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SimHacker (180785) * on Monday February 13 2006, @12:05PM (#14707591) Homepage Journal

    The Exploratorium [exploratorium.com] in San Francisco had a multi-point touch screen paint system like this in the early 90's, which anyone could play with. It was really great, and quite elegant! It was running a fun program that let you paint with your fingertips, real paintbrushes dipped in water, as well as textured objects like a sponge and play-dough. It used an oblique video camera behind a plate of glass, and your fingers or the wet brush changed the index of refraction in a way that would show up brightly on the camera, and thus paint on the screen. There was no limit to the number of points you could paint at once, and what you could use as a brush was only limited by your imagination and what you could get away with in public: you could paint with brushes, sponges, clay, your fingertips, the palms of both hands, your face, your tongue, your boobs, greasy french fries and hamburger patties, or vomit on the screen to make interesting textures. (It's a good thing the Exploratorium makes everything robust, kid-proof, and easy to clean! I've been to some great parties at that place...)

    -Don

  • It looks like a continuation of the technology employed by fingerworks [fingerworks.com] which used some type of capacitance array to track points. It looks like they finally have it on a visual screen. Hopefully this will increase the addoption of gesture-based controls.

    • Re:fingerworks (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ford Prefect (8777) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:23PM (#14707838) Homepage
      Entirely different - it's based on something called 'frustrated internal reflection'. Simple version: you have a thin slab of transparent perspex with LEDs around the sides. The light from the LEDs is kept inside thanks to total internal reflection - it's a bit like a big flat piece of fibre optic cable in a sense.

      When you place a finger or other appendage on the upper surface of the perspex, the total internal reflection breaks down and the fingertip (or whatever) gets illuminated - you track this with a camera pointing upwards at the perspex. To get the computer display gubbins, you also have a video projector pointing at the perspex.

      I'm not sure how amenable it is to miniaturisation, but since it's used in fingerprint readers (without the video display) it's probably not too bad - presumably you'd have to change the projector and camera to flat equivalents, of course...

      (Something I noticed on the page last week - a reference to work on identifying which finger is touching the display. He's updated that sentence to "Wouldn't it also be nice to identify which finger (e.g. thumb, index, etc.) is associated with each contact?" - but I'd had a sudden vision of this thing using fingerprints as, well, unique finger identification tags. The guy behind it seems pretty big on computer vision, and is also working on stuff like a "new generation of CMOS imaging sensors that feature on-board signal processing functionality, we are experimenting with creating a 1000fps non-invasive eye-tracker for under $100" - maybe some custom hardware for tracking and zooming in on the glowing fingerprints and identifying the fingers from there?)
  • They didnt write all their own software, they used NASA World Wind (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] as well (satellite / aerial imagery viewer).
  • Hmmmmmm, though I wonder what power consumption is like.

  • Damnit!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CatsupBoy (825578) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:07PM (#14707626)
    Now my favorite touch screen gag is obsoleted:
    User: This touch screen is awesome, but how do I right click on items?
    Me: Use your right hand

    *user stares blankly*

  • May I suggest? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anti Frozt (655515) <chris...buffett@@@gmail...com> on Monday February 13 2006, @12:08PM (#14707640)
    "I'd offer up organs for one of these things."

    This being /., we all know which organ should be first to go, seeing as how it's the least used.
  • I appreciate that touch screens are faster to use in some situations compared to a mouse, and in some situations (public access terminals in a cinema etc.) they are better but for the average consumer are touch screens necessary. Most people out there have been brought up with the mouse and are very adapt at using it. Other than the coolness factor (akin to having the fastest graphics card available to play doom3 at 200fps) is there a real market/need for touch screens for general consumers? Especially co
    • While the cost of this sort of hardware will be prohibitive for large-scale use, I fully believe that it's just this sort of interface that will someday replace the mouse. Keyboards are likely to remain in use for a very long time, but mice are simply a pointing device... and we all come with a natural built-in pointer (our fingers).

      In the comming decades, I'd expect people's "monitors" to be replaced with hardware similar to this drafting-table design.

    • What's so hard about using touch screens for the average consumer? They had to learn how to use mice, and it didn't kill them. I don't know of many ATMs that use mice, but a whole lot of them use touch screens, and they seem to be pretty popular with consumers.

      But the point of this article that some people seem to be missing, is that the device is much more advanced than a typical touch screen, because it can sense multiple points of contact at once. Which is an advantage for people who have more than o

  • Me too (Score:4, Funny)

    by thefirelane (586885) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:16PM (#14707743)
    I'd offer up organs for one of these things

    Me too, just not mine.

    Ba-Bing!

  • Wow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom (822) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:17PM (#14707756) Homepage Journal
    That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.

    See, a lot of buttons on the mouse and on the screen are merely to differentiate between different actions, e.g. resize, fullscreen or close a window. More logical and intuitive options are possible with multitouch technology, e.g. as shown in the demos.
    • Good point about the tactile feedback. I think the ultimate iteration of this device would incorporate some kind of magnetic or piezoelectric layer in a pixel grid, so that arbitrary pixels can be made to pulse. Pulse rapidly to create vibrations. This would enable tactile keyboard response, button clicking response, "dragging" response - all kinds of interesting tactile feedback.
  • It's like a bigger fancier version of Jazzmutant [jazzmutant.com]'s Lemur device, used for controlling virtual synth plugins and the like. It even uses the same OSC protocol, I wonder if they're based on similar multi-touch tech...

  • Lemur++? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jeremi (14640) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:24PM (#14707853) Homepage
    FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur [jazzmutant.com] is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl [berkeley.edu]. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.
  • I'd offer up organs for a lot of things, this just happens to NOT be one of them. Maybe for a Lamborghini, a mansion, some super-model to love me and hold me and squeeze me - but yea, not a touch screen.
    Now if we were talking true VR (think matrix) then yea they could have my organs.
  • http://madmappers.freeearthfoundation.com/multitou chreel.mpg [freeearthfoundation.com]

    For all you mad slashdot clickers :D
  • I'm surprised no one has mentioned this looks like Star Trek: TNG consoles.

    Either way... I could really use something like this, but I bet it gets dirty really quick. My Nintendo DS is kind of greasy as it is.
  • I had an orgasm just watching the video. Can you imagine how embarassing that would be if I used the thing 8 hours a day in an office???
  • Anybody that can't see the benefits and cool factor of this need to go back to their caves and pull out some charcoal.

    Someone said they can't see the average user wanting this? Did you see the video? I could see about a dozen areas that the average end user would wan this display for:

    Multimedia organization( group photos quickly and in a more native concept)
    Multimedia editing.
    More robust UI interaction and quicker access. Believe it or not, the computer mouse is not intuitive compared to point and touch.

  • Minority Report (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tamnir (230394) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:33PM (#14707982) Homepage
    After the initial "Oooooh, shiny! I'll give a kidney for one!" impulse, this reminds me quite a bit of the spiffy user interface in Minority Report, probably because of the intense arms-waving involved. So, makes me think the same too: very cool to see, but highly impractical. Your arms and shoulders would get painfully tired after just a few minutes using this...

    So, I'll be keeping my kidney this time, thank you very much. I'll just go grab a box of tissues and watch the video again... ;-)
      • The thing that causes me discomfort when using a computer for long periods is shoulder tension from suspending my arms and hands in place over my keyboard.

        Ouch, sorry to hear that. Sounds like you need to lower your keyboard: in the rest position, there should be no strain in your arms or shoulders. If you feel you're raising your shoulders in the rest position, your keyboard/desk surface is too high.

        Unfortunately, desk surface height is rarely adjustable. The trick then is to get a higher chair. Note that

  • It'll never fly. (Score:5, Funny)

    by doublem (118724) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:40PM (#14708075) Homepage Journal
    Let me spell it out:

    Major technological innovations in computers and the Internet have been driven by porn. Adoption rates are, among most early adopters, driven by that technology's ability to deliver porn. This is true of Broadband, the early graphics card races, DVD drives and the Internet itself.

    This interface requires two hands.

    Need I say more?

    Don't make me to spell it out in anatomical detail.

  • I'd give my left hand (Score:5, Funny)

    by mattnuzum (839319) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:44PM (#14708136) Homepage
    I'd give my left hand for a two-handed touch screen. ;-)
    • It's 'special' because, as a first, it looks very cool, but it also serves as more than a keyboard (actually watching the video might help, you know).

      While applications like this have been around before, most of the time they still had to be controlled with a special hardware-device: And it's very cool to see they now succeeded in bringing it to only be controlled by the fingers.

      • So will applications have to be written (or rewritten) to except inputs from this screen?

        • Just as keyboard driven applications had to be rewritten to accept input from mice. Horribly traumatic, wasn't it?

          -Don

        • I'd go with "written" though there might be a few that exist that can break through the concept of having a single pointer, which is what this kind of touchscreen amounts to. Someone might make a mouse driver that uses the multiple points of contact to emulate a mouse (might even be able to make some operations easier than a normal touchpad, like drag and drop) but that wouldn't really use the full power of something like this.

          It might be interesting to try and get some OS/windowing system to accept multip
        • I want the Minority Report style wall. I did a user interface experiment using the virtual whiteboards at my college: Which was more intuitive for arranging data. Up/Down buttons in a list, drag and drop with mouse, or drag and drop on a 'real' surface. Guess which won?

    • Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:5, Informative)

      by SimHacker (180785) * on Monday February 13 2006, @12:08PM (#14707632) Homepage Journal

      What's special is that it can sense more than one point of contact at once. In fact not just "more than one" but "any number of" points of contact in parallel. It's a totally different ball game than standard touch screens. A typical touch screen only reports one X,Y position at a time (like a mouse), which is typically the average of the points of contact (depending on the pressure, and the type of touch screen of course).

      -Don

      • Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:4, Informative)

        by onemorehour (162028) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:26PM (#14707880)
        What's special is that it can sense more than one point of contact at once.

        That's not actually special when you're talking about some keyboards. I am typing this right now on a Fingerworks Touchstream LP, which is based on this technology. To type a single letter, you make one contact on the touchpad. To move your mouse, you put down two fingers simultaneously and move them. To click and drag, you use three fingers. To scroll, four. It also understands five-finger combinations and tracks movements, processing them as interactive "gestures" that can be mapped to functionality like opening, closing, saving, zooming, etc. This company was sadly bought out by some third party (rumored to be Apple or Wacom), who took the technology but has not kept up the line of keyboards. Apple's recent announcement makes me believe that they may have been the buyer.

      • Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Why is this one special?
        I've owned a multiple input touchscreen for some months now called the Lemur.
        http://www.cycling74.com/products/lemur [cycling74.com]

        The Lemur *is* special, as not only do you get multiple inputs, you also get them fast enough to perform with, and loads of presets for music apps.

    • Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:5, Funny)

      by murphyslawyer (534449) on Monday February 13 2006, @12:26PM (#14707873) Homepage
      The difference is you could *totally* take down a Gibson with one of these puppies.

    • I'd offer up organs for one of these things.

      I'm sure a lot of us would be happy to offer up CmdrTaco's organs for one of these things, too. Now where's that bathtub full of ice cubes :-)

    • Here's a description of Myron Krueger's classic Videodesk system, from Jakob Nielson's CHI'88 Trip Report [useit.com] (in which he also described our presentation of pie menus).

      -Don

      Videodesk: Computing on the Desktop

      Current marketing trends in the personal computer business emphasize "desktop this" and "desktop that" - desktop publishing, desktop presentations, desktop video, desktop CAD... as a catch phrase for doing things on small, desktop computers. It is also possible, however, to actually do computing o

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