Multitouch Without Touch Using Wiimote

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.

Who would have thought...

[Digitus1337]

That we'd get our first glimpse of those cool minority report interfaces from a game console. I always figured it would be thanks to porn.

Everyone loves writing software... plus the Vicon

[compumike]

But software will only take you so far. There's a lot of unique PC to human interactions that are possible, but this world needs more hardware hackers.

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]

Re:Good Point

[CastrTroy]

I don't think that something like this would take over as the standard form of input, however, it could be useful for doing things like presentations. Imagine if you were in a small meeting, with about 5 people, and each one had a wiimote, and each one was able to draw things on the screen. Somebody watching a presentation could point the wiimote at a diagram to show everyone exactly what part he was asking a question about. Just because it isn't the best solution in all cases, doesn't mean it's can't be a good solution for some cases. And considering that wiimotes are quite cheap, it could work out as a very good solution.

Re:Good Point

[Tom]

You haven't seen Jeff Han's talk [ted.com].

"Holy Grail" is pretty old tech already

[bobbaddeley]

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.

[bigattichouse]

Seems to me we always seem to be building technology to make old ideas into a reality. I've always felt that all these hands-free interface ideas look like wizards waving their hands around in the air. If they had eye-glass headsup displays, they'd look like they're casting spells or something.

Its not that it is indistinguishable from magic, its that were TRYING to make it look like that.

Just a thought.

Re:safe to use?

[pilardi]

(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 so they may be slightly off.

A bright enough near-ir LED can damage your eyes, just as a bright enough visible LED can damage your eyes. The difference is that you notice the visible LED long before it starts to damage your eyes, but you won't notice the IR LED until perhaps it's too late. People who work with lasers (such as myself) have similar issues, you have to be very careful around IR lasers because you won't know if they are damaging your eyes until it's too late.

Given that, I doubt these LEDs are bright enough to do any damage.