The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Feb 13, 2006 01:00 PM
from the please-let-me-have-one dept.
from the please-let-me-have-one dept.
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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The Exploratorium had an exhibit like that (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:The Exploratorium had an exhibit like that (Score:3, Interesting)
Damnit!!! (Score:5, Funny)
May I suggest? (Score:5, Funny)
This being
Re:May I suggest? (Score:3, Funny)
Considering this *is* Slashdot, it'd probably have to be the brain. :)
Re:May I suggest? (Score:5, Funny)
Me too (Score:4, Funny)
Me too, just not mine.
Ba-Bing!
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Lemur++? (Score:4, Informative)
Minority Report (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Minority Report (Score:3, Informative)
Ouch, sorry to hear that. Sounds like you need to lower your keyboard: in the rest position, there sh
It'll never fly. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:It'll never fly. (Score:5, Funny)
In soviet russia, touch screen touches you?
I'd give my left hand (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
While applications like this have been around before, most of the time they still had to be controlled wi
Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Insightful)
Just as keyboard driven applications had to be rewritten to accept input from mice. Horribly traumatic, wasn't it?
-Don
Two trackpoints on one keyboard (Score:3, Interesting)
Ted Selker [ibm.com] invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab [ibm.com]. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red [slashdot.org]" two page Thinkpad ad?)
At one of the New Paridigms for U [ibm.com]
Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Interesting)
Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
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 l
Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
Multi-point gesture interfaces go back a whole lot further than 2001. What's so special and original about Diamond Touch? Other than the obvious advantage s of being built out of modern technology, how does it compare with Myron Krueger's [siggraph.org] work [ctheory.net], which [jtnimoy.com] goes [medienkunstnetz.de]
Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fingerworks (Score:4, Interesting)
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?)
Myron Krueger's Videodesk System (Score:3, Informative)
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 c