Microsoft Buys Multi-Touch Pioneer Perceptive Pixel 85
theodp writes "Back in 2006, a post on Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology — a real TED crowd-pleaser — gave Slashdot readers a taste of the iPhone and iPad future. Han spun off his NYU Research into a company called Perceptive Pixel which, among other things, gave the world CNN's Amazing Magic Wall. On Monday, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft is acquiring Perceptive Pixel, which not only means you'll be able to run Windows 8 on an 82-inch touchscreen, but that the Apple v,. Motorola Mobility lawsuit is about to get more interesting!"
Re:Remember the gorilla arm syndrome (Score:5, Informative)
I use my Tablet PC comfortably cradled in one arm, or propped comfortably on a table or desk.
For the tactile feedback, there're a number of companies working on this, most recent I came across:
http://senseg.com/technology/senseg-technology [senseg.com]
William
Re:Remember the gorilla arm syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Who took them away from you? There's plenty of phones with buttons, plenty of feature phones, and if you really want to get medieval, you can even find phones that can barely text. How about you stop trying to stifle things you don't understand?
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I want touchscreen *and* tactile (Score:2)
I would love a phone with a touchscreen but on which I can also feel the buttons. Haptics, dynamic morphing, whatever, I don't care how they do it.
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Hell to the yeah brother. First one to get that right (and durable) gets riiiich.
Or sued into oblivion since there's about a billion patents for useless tech that's tangentially related to it and not even really trying to build toward the goal.
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I gotta say, that Cadillac commercial where they're pimping their touchscreen just seemed so stupid to me. If there's one place I want to do everything by feel, it's a vagina. But if there were two, it'd be a vagina and a car.
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The bigger question is WHY am I trying to use a phone to work excel!
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Not unlike what they did with MSN in the olden days (The Microsoft Network). They developed a copycat product to what AOL, Prodigy, Genie, Compuserve etc. had brought to market ages ago. They tried making the internet look like Windows, and then later had to backtrack and try to make Windows look more like the internet.
Re:Remember the gorilla arm syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't Microsoft figured out yet that humans need tactile feedback for any kind of prolonged operation, and aren't designed for holding our hands out from our body?
I take it you aren't a teacher. I write on a 200 inch vertical surface with no tactile feedback for 2 hours at a time. This thing would be amazing in my classroom.
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I take it you aren't a teacher. I write on a 200 inch vertical surface with no tactile feedback for 2 hours at a time. This thing would be amazing in my classroom.
I take it you are a teacher. Cause no one else would fail to see that using multi-touch on an 84" screen means waving both arms around. But since you claim it'll be amazing for you, I wish you good luck. Except that I think that 3-4 months of salary could be better spent on other things our schools lack. Like teachers.
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We don't lack teachers, we lack will and motivation.
we lack teachers (Score:3)
30+ small children in a class is too many for effective learning
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In the US, we've doubled the number of teachers in 10 years, while the number of students has gone up 8%.
Though to be fair, a lot of the new hires, which are categorized as "teachers" are teacher's assistants.
I don't know...last year I taught in an inner-city high school, not as part of the curriculum, but as a coach of a martial arts team. It had been several decades since I've been in a high school. I saw a lot of things wrong, but "not enough teachers" was not the one that jumped out at me. Maybe qua
Re:Remember the gorilla arm syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Cause no one else would fail to see that using multi-touch on an 84" screen means waving both arms around.
Yeah, I'm failing to see that, especially since I'm watching it in use [youtu.be] and don't see the guy waving around both arms. With your use of the word "waving" you're trying to convey this wild flailing motion, but the actual interaction with the device seems as natural as what I would do on a chalk board.
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Yeah, I'm failing to see that, especially since I'm watching it in use and don't see the guy waving around both arms.
The hand waving starts at around 2:38
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Why the hell do you think a multi-touch screen requires waving 2 hands around? I use my iPad one-handed, and millions of people use smartphones with only one hand as well.
I think you're in desperate need of some education yourself. Try a critical thinking class.
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Why the hell do you think a multi-touch screen requires waving 2 hands around? I use my iPad one-handed, and millions of people use smartphones with only one hand as well.
Your iPad and the smartphones aren't 58" as per TFA.
Using multi-touch gestures a couple of inches in size isn't useful on a display that is intended to be seen from across the room. Even if you were Paganini, you'd need two hands and arms waving.
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I assume your 200 inch vertical surface is a chalk board (unless they have come up with some new tech I haven't heard of) and you say that you get no tactile feedback. I think your using it wrong!
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unless they have come up with some new tech I haven't heard of
Yes, the marker board, also known as the white board. It has very low friction compared to a chalk board. Either way, a multi-touch screen like this could mimic the same friction as either a white or chalk board, providing the same level of tactile feedback. I have a tablet PC with a stylus, and I can insert different tips, and depending on how much drag I want the pen to have it can feel like writing with a pen or a pencil. Same idea could be used here.
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i think you should describe how your teaching methodology would change (for the better) if you were using an active surface vs a marker board vs a projected pc/tablet image.
i think it would be cool... but then i am just a geek :)
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Standing
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Or have you ever had a teacher say "I'm a terrible artist, but I'll give it a shot" maybe in math class when drawing 3D objects? With a surface like this, those could be pre-loaded and
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You are an idiot.
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Hmmm, but you don't work at the whiteboard/chalkboard to be individually productive. You do it in order to be seen from a distance without technological assistance.
Would you choose to do the rest of your work on a vertical 200" workspace? I doubt it.
Oh, and I am amazed that you have purchased non-tactile chalk... does it exude an anesthetic?
Touchscreens are tactile... you touch them.
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You do it in order to be seen from a distance without technological assistance. Would you choose to do the rest of your work on a vertical 200" workspace? I doubt it.
So what's your point exactly? Different tools for different jobs? Okay, that's obvious.
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I just bought a smartphone with a slideout keyboard seven months ago. It has great tactile feedback, as I mostly got it for email (the only 'smart' thing I really got the phone for anyway). And yes, you can dial numbers from the slideout keypad - the learning curve is only a tiny bit sharper than a traditional 'dumb' phone for making calls on tactile feedback alone. It sounds like you just suck at shopping around to find exactly what you want.
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Actually calling via the phone is terrible. The quality is crap, the latency all over the place, their is no video, and it still wants to be synchronous.
I agree multitouch is pointless for full size screens, but having a computer with me at all times is very useful. Tactile buttons reduce the screen size, which is a far bigger hindrance since phone calls are a tiny part of what these devices due.
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When I was young, we had text screens and you needed to basically be literate to "do stuff" with text, capable of abstract thought and reasoning. That was OK, only us elite used computers anyway.
Then we had to squander processing power and programmer effort to make everything GUI graphical to make it as simple as possible for illiterate noobs and damn the productivity collapse to the literate. But, hey, at least I get a nice screen and when I'm allowed to use old fashioned "text" instead of incomprehensib
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You know, if you can't see, just *speak* to your phone, and tell it to call who you want to call.
Yes, we all know how reliable voice recognition is.
Let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Figures I've seen shows that north of 75% of all calls made on devices with voice assisted dialling are made without using voice assisted dialling. Why? Because it's so darn unreliable, as anyone who's had a phone can attest to.
"Call mom"
"Calling Ron"
"No, not RON, dammit, call MOM."
"Calling ENRON. Sorry, the number you dialled can not be reached"
"Em Oh Em for god's sake"
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Are you retarded? I have used speech recognition on the Droid X for a year and a half now and it has NEVER gotten what I said wrong.
No, not retarded. I have something you'll never have: a deep voice.
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+1 funny
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I think I use less than 100 minutes a month worth of actual voice communication with my phone. Text, chat, and email have pretty much completely replaced the need to have voice conversation; the only person I actually talk to on the phone is my mother, and even she is getting on the text bandwagon, now that she has finally gotten herself a cellphone.
Some people see it as a bad thing that we're not literally talking to one another like we used to, but honestly, I don't see it as a bad thing at all. When I
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Controlling a large work PC screen ain't it.
That depends...at least for me...if you give me a 23" in front of me and another 23" right in the table I'm all in! Well, at least if I can configure the system to work, like switching the touchscreen in the desk from input, to mirror to...arrr...what was the name? Stand-alone-display? Extended Desktop? Multihead?
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Maybe it's time someone made a peripheral (or linked to one if it already exists).
Another useful feature would be a tutorial/training mode where the buttons touch/
More interesting? (Score:5, Insightful)
A more pertinent point. (Score:2)
So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
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So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
Actually, when I was a grad student at NYU in 2002, when Jeff started there, he wasn't paid or funded at all. He wasn't a student, and didn't even have an office. He was just there for fun.
From what I recall, Jeff made a decent amount of money right out of college in the dot-com boom (I think it was with CUSeeMe, an early teleconference software). After cashing that out just in time, he didn't need to work, from what I gathered, so he just was looking for a place to hang out around other interesting people
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What I can't figure out is why Microsoft wants an old version of Ubuntu.
Apple v Motorola Mobility? (Score:1)
Apple Didn't Invent Multi-Touch? (Score:2)
Re:Apple Didn't Invent Multi-Touch? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of brilliant. Y'know, in a total bastard kind of way.
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No Apple is great at marketing the features of their phones. They didn't invent it or patent it first. One of the earliest patents for multi-touch using capacitance belonged to FingerWorks who made keyboards. Apple bought the company specifically for their patents.
Remember not only can a function be patented but the methodology as well. For example, TVs were orginally CRT. LCD, Plasma, LED, DLP, etc deliver the same basic function but with a different method. Any new TV tech must reference CRT as pr
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Abstract - A prototype touch-sensitive tablet Is presented. The tablet's main innovation is that It Is capable of sensing mare than one point of contact at a time. In addition to being able to provide position coordinates, the tablet also gives a measure of degree of contact, independently for each point of contact. In order to enable multi-touch sensing, the tablet surface is divided into a grid of discrete points. The points are scanned using a recursive area subdivision algorithm. In order to minimize the resolution lost due to the discrete nature of the grid, a novel interpolation scheme has been developed. Finally, the paper briefly discusses how multi-touch sensing, interpolation, and degree of contact sensing can be combined to expand our vocabulary In human-computer Interaction.
Video [youtube.com]
This stuff wasn't new in 1998, and it certainly wasn't new in 2006 with the release of the iPhone. Apple has proven to be litigious enough as of late, so why haven't they taken these multi-touch patents out of the war chest? Is it because they expect them to be summarily struck down due to
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You fail to understand what "this stuff" is, and how patents work.
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Here [nytimes.com] is an article from 2002 discussing one of their products in the NY Times.
Apple purchased Fingerworks a year before Jeff Han's now famous TED talk.
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The original patents on multi-touch belonged to a company founded back in 1998 called Fingerworks
That's interesting, since actual multitouch systems predate Fingerworks by almost 2 decades. [billbuxton.com]
Here's an example of the pinch gesture being used in 1988: http://youtu.be/dmmxVA5xhuo?t=4m32s [youtu.be]
Why isn't Apple suing every phone manufacturer in existence? I'm quite sure Apple doesn't want its acquired patents to face their day in court.
No, Apple just sat on the best parts. (Score:3)
You know how I can tell you didn't read the patents?
I owned one of the FingerWorks keyboards. Their gesture-recognition technology seemed like it had been reverse-engineered from UFOs, or brought back by a time-traveler from the far future. It was enormously more advanced than the work Buxton cites, not to slight Bill in any way (he was a big influence on my own doctoral work in HCI).
I only hope that Microsoft does a better job of popularizing Han's advanced features. Apple still has barely begun to exploit
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This is just not the case, as these technologies existed for decades even before Fingerworks existed. In fact, in his thesis [udel.edu], co-founder of Fingerworks Wayne Westerman cit
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Patents are not about these "foundations" of yours, but about specific ways of doing something. Otherwise, you would only be able to patent any form of tech once, when in reality you should not be able to patent general concepts at all.
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the patent system is the new housing bubble.
LoB
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There's already a term for it: different.
The notion of using a touch-sensitive surface to control an electronic device isn't patentable. The specific type of device, paired with the specific type of screen, and controlled in a specific manner, is all wrapped up in a single invention. Change any core component, and you aren't infringing the patent. Apple's recent inductive-charging patent [uspto.gov], for example, actually covers inductive chargers that also use reradiating antennas to amplify the charged device's commu
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Even Apple wasn't dumb enough to actually sue Jeff Han. NYU MRL researchers had been thinking about multi-touch long before Jeff came up with the idea of using FTIR to implement it. Pinch zoom was one of the obvious things we did and didn't even think of patenting it. But had Apple sued you can be sure a lot of prior art would have been put on the table to invalidate their multi-touch patents. They must know about the prior art by now or they'd be threatening their competitors for that instead of things lik
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Ah, yes, how could we have a tech story without mentioning Apple. They have become this sort of reverse Streisand Effect.
Hint: If there are two distinct ways of "using inductive charging in computing and portable devices" there can be two patents. You cannot - or at least should not be able to - patent the general concept of something, just one particular way of doing it.
Oh Yeah, MS Office (Score:2, Troll)
“By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers.”
Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch. Oh and if I was going to buy a Perceptive Pixel product, I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs. I think by "broad set of customers" he meant "now just Windows us
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Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch.
I'm sure he's thinking more along the lines of powerpoint, and something like this being in every corporate meeting room. Imagine being able to author multitouch powerpoint presentations easily, and wirelessly streaming to something like this with no little to no configuration. Technical difficulties with presentation equipment still have not gone away, and this might be a solution where Microsoft can say "Buy our OS, buy our office, buy our screen, and never fumble with presentation audio/visuals again."
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I find I give a better presentation with just a chalkboard. It forces me to think through the presentation rather than reduce everything to bullet points. I'm no artist and don't give a flying rat's ass about graphics.
One time on CSPAN I saw David Patraeus give a PP presentation. He got to one slide and there were arrows here and there, pointlessly pointing at nothing in particular. He made some comment about having to rearrange the slide for some reason and then glanced off camera and said "If the Microsof
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Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch.
I want it for presentations, training sessions and so on.
It would be trivially easy to launch an on-screen keyboard or keypad when needed.
I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs.
Tech like this is shared like a photocopier and is not your personal, private, playground.
Twister! (Score:2)
So, if this thing is tough enough, it could be laid flat on the floor and someone can write a Twister game for it...
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Or a really big cat toy :)
[John]
Perceptive Pixel (Score:3)