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Multitouch Without Touch Using Wiimote
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 12, 2007 03:47 PM
from the right-touch dept.
from the right-touch dept.
owlgorithm writes to mention that Gizmodo has a neat hack for the multitouch Holy Grail — multitouch without the touch. This hack turns the Wiimote into a receiver for IR light reflected from an emitter off of your fingers using reflective tape.
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Wiimote as Multi-Touch Display Controller 107 comments
Tmack writes "While hard-hacks with the Wiimote are somewhat old news, this particular implementation is quite interesting. Using the infrared camera on the Wiimote, pens with LEDs instead of ink, and an LCD projector, Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University has created software to use them as a (relatively) cheap multi-touch display. Any surface onto which you can project becomes an interactive multi-touch display, as demonstrated in the video at the link. He has the software available for download, along with some other neat projects.
Lee has also documented another impressive Wiimote hack.
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Who would have thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what they say... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Power Glove redeaux? (Score:4, Funny)
This could be really awesome. I can see this as a great way to bring good strategy games to consoles. It might even be better than a mouse. Supreme Commander with your fingers on a Wii? Nevermind that the Wii would gag on the graphics load, but the gameplay is intriguing.
Good Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good Point (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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When I was in boot camp, sometimes they would punish us by making us hold a pencil. We had to hold it with both arms held straight out. We were young kids in pretty decent shape and it didn't take long at all for it to get pretty painful. Just the weight of holding up your arms can get to be too much after a while.
If they had you hold your arms out to the sides instead of out in front, it would have had another name: Crucifixion. Anything done long enough can be painful.
I'd be very glad to see an actual game or product along these lines as it would introduce more exercise into the lives of the users. A really simple product that would work well with this would be in fast food. instead of having the workers touch a button with their gloves or hands, they just select the option they want in the air. And tell me,
Re:Good Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says you have to aim at the tv?
It might work coming to the actual glass surface which means you could lay your arm down and rest it like a mouse but you have the third dimension when you need it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good Point (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Everyone loves writing software... plus the Vicon (Score:4, Interesting)
In any case, this is a neat demo. People have been doing this on a much bigger, 3D, expensive $$$ scale with something called a Vicon Motion Capture System [vicon.com]. They basically take a whole bunch of those cameras, and a whole bunch of LED arrays, and strobe them so that they get a picture of little reflective points from many different angles. They then use some trigonometry to figure out where, in 3D space, a particular point is. Cool stuff -- good to see it's being brought closer to everyone's homes, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars that Vicon charges.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
nerds at four o'clock!! (ok, slightly after...) (Score:5, Funny)
damn.
YouTube Link (Score:3, Informative)
"Holy Grail" is pretty old tech already (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Holy Grail" of multitouch without the touch is a pretty old problem. I've been working on something at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a while called the HI-Space table, and it was around before I came to the lab. It uses infrared and a camera and detects multiple inputs simultaneously, as well as object placed on the table. It doesn't require touching at all and works fairly well, detecting not only single fingers but each of the fingers, allowing the user to do different things with different arrangements of fingers. It understands motions as well, and can detect a swipe, circle, etc. Objects aren't tagged with anything special; they're just cardboard shapes.
Here's a video of the HI-Space table in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFBoq1i81V4 [youtube.com]
Here's an old link to some of the work: http://infoviz.pnl.gov/hces/ [pnl.gov]
Stuck in our past. (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not that it is indistinguishable from magic, its that were TRYING to make it look like that.
Just a thought.
Danger to eyes (Score:4, Informative)
I would suggest doing this in a very well lit room, and NEVER in the dark, or you will likely seriously damage your eyes.
Re:Danger to eyes (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Danger to eyes (Score:4, Informative)
This thing gives off IR in a different frequency than the human body of course, but if in general IR light is "dangerous", then we'd all be blind years ago.
The near-IR light given off by this type of device has very little to do with thermal IR. It is much closer to visible red light, just a bit lower frequency (a couple of hundred nm or less difference, versus thermal IR being closer to ten times lower frequency).
Human eyes are also opaque to thermal IR, which is related to what the GP was getting at - near-IR is potentially dangerous because your eyes are transparent to it, but your retina has very little sensitivity to it. I doubt the amount of NIR illumination here is very significant, but imagine the equivalent of having a bright flashlight stuck in your face, except without the ability of your pupils to contract in response.
Parent
The goggles they do nothing (Score:5, Funny)
But it occured to me that you could use a penis instead of a finger (giving it another use beside: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/21 [penny-arcade.com] )
(Why, oh why this thought came to me...)
Supply will increase massively soon (Score:2)
Re:Supply will increase massively soon (Score:4, Informative)
We're working very hard to make sure that consumers are satisfied this holiday, but I can't guarantee that we're going to meet demand. As a matter of fact, I can tell you on the record we won't.
I guess I'm going to have to start trolling target, walmart and such on a regular basis.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(Infrared == heat)
This is not quite true. If (infrared == heat) then (visible light == even hotter heat). Every thing emits light. Things at normal environmental temperature (0-100 degC) emit primarily in the long-wave to mid-wave IR (about 10000nm or so). A typical IR LED emits in the near-ir (about 900nm or so) which corresponds to about 1000 degC or so. Red light, which is about 700nm, corresponds to about 3000 degC or so. So saying infrared == heat is very misleading. Caveat: the number are off the top of my head