Slashdot Mirror
Holographic Keypads Float Into View
prostoalex writes "The New York Times tells the story of a Connecticut-based company called HoloTouch that is developing input devices that literally "float in the air". The technology will be licensed for information kiosks in New York city. Some other sample applications are available from the company's Web site. HoloTouch already managed to secure the patent on its technology."
And that's .. part of our world.
Isn't it hard enough surfing for porn with one hand already?
What about hexadecimal and dvorak (or other more efficient layouts)? Let's transition there first.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I don't know about you, but the first thing I did when I got to that page was download the gigantic 500k image of the Holotouch president's gigantic yellow-toothed bald HEAD. Talk about putting a pretty face on the industry! yeah...
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
But have they really been able to build one, or are they just patenting the idea with hopes someone else will and they they can sue and get rich? I see nothing on their website (other than very obviously mocked up fake pictures) or in the patent that says they really know how to do this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Yeah, but what if you only have one eye? You can't see a hologram with only one eye. There's a whole bag of "this is not handicap accessible" with their name on it.
Not to mention, I like command line consoles. I guess its just that old style charm. I think I prefer plain old buttons under my fingers too. Maybe you could learn to type fast on a hologram, but with no physical feedback, it seems like it would be a royal pain to type at any great speed.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
And so the CEO discovers the consequences of posting a 450k jpeg of himself.
I can't be the only one that thinks holographic keyboards would be a great idea for public computers, just so we needn't worry about the disgusting pub-funk that seems to coat most public keyboards.
The coolest voice ever.
The site is slashdotted already.
Just imagine the spectacle of "404 error" numbers flashing and floating in mid-air.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
We used to live in caves. Your body is perfectly capable of seeing off any nastyness you pick up of public keyboards.
To much cleanliness is just as unhealthy as too little. People that wash their hands all the time are generally ill far more often than those that feed their bodies immune system and let it develop in the way in which it is supposed to.
Oh God. Just imagin if you want to go to Google.com but instead land at Gooogle.com... Or pop-ups... Or better yet... Japanese Killer Seizure Robots floating floating in your face!
People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.
Especially, if they plan to use this sort of thing for remote medical procedures. Imagine a doctor trying to perform a delicate surgery, without any sort of sensation of touch whatsoever.
Maybe they'll come up with force feedback gloves or something.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I have a doormat in front of my front door. It's a holodoormat, not a square drawn on the ground with chalk as someone of lesser intelligence might think. When you step on it it'll ring the door bell (after you hit the button). Anyone wanna buy one? Oh and I have 10MB images that you can download of it; and they aren't picture of my front door with a photoshopped square drawn where a doormat should be. I swear.
-Valiss
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Not much detail on the company's website. I'm interested in how they construct the image. If it is truely holographic, then it will require a medium for the image to be projected on. After all, a hologram is just an interference pattern. That is unless of course they plan on projecting directly onto the retina which I find hard to believe. So the image won't float in the air above the body of the person being operated on, it will float in front of some display case. It won't be visible from all angles either. They don't call it a free floating volumetric display, so it must be projected. It sounds cool, but not as cool as it's made out.
I can see some advantages to a keyboard you wouldn't have to touch, but I don't think I could use it. The feedback I get by pressing the keys is how I know that I hit the correct one and that I pressed down far enough. The feel of the keyboard is also how I know where to position my hands without looking. I would probably have to look at something like this while I type, which would slow me down drastically.
why not? Your eyes act as two high-res cameras, so how could you see it, but a mechanical camera could not? Perhaps it wouldn't have the right dimensions through a single camera, but it wouldn't be invisible to a single camera while magically visible to a pair of cameras connected via a bit of wetware.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
They just pointed out that it was already patented. This isn't a ridiculous patent with an enormous amount of prior art to illustrate that it never should have been granted in the first place (AFAIK, IANAL).
With a holgraphic keyboard, you get the ability to customize on the fly, so you can adjust the keyboard position and size for the person.
But...... it can't be used as a long term replacement for a keyboard. A regular keyboard provides lift to the fingers when releasing the keys, thus reducing the work on the fingers. This cuts down on RSIs.
Fight Spammers!
Can you read the patent and figure out how the "The holographic image generator 200" works? I sure can't. Maybe I'm just dense and others can point out the invcention here, but how the hell does their supposed holographic image generator 200 work? If the purpose of a patent is to disclose how a device functions, and in doing so give the inventor a limited time monopoly on the invention in return for information that becomes public knowledge and will eventually become freely useable by all, then I think this patent falls far short of this requirement. I have serious doubts that the company even invented anything at all, it looks more to me like they hope someone else will and that they can then sue them, based on having obtained a patent without actually inventing anything or provide the public any value in return for the patent.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
For some reason, the image comes to mind, unbidden:
Cowboy Neal, marching down the street, wearing display goggles. His special custom hologram GUI/keyboard hovers in front of him (he can see it in his goggles, no one else can).
Trying to keep Slashdot afloat, he is furiously moderating the new posts: both fists are stabbing middle fingers all over the place right and left in front of him in mid-air as he walks down the street.
To passersby, it looks like a cross between Mike Tyson, an NYC cabbie flipping the bird out the window, the the crazy homeless man who walks around talking to himself.
Now people won't have to strain their necks to see your pin number while shoulder surfing.
[sarcasm]
I can hardly wait!
[/sarcasm]
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Unfortunately they didn't do their homework :(
From the website:
HoloTouch, images of keypads can be any size, entirely independent of the size of the hardware.
(emphasis my own)
From the patent:
When a hologram is illuminated by a reconstruction beam, it produces a real image (which appears to be between the plane of the hologram and the viewer) and a virtual image (which appears to be behind the plane of the hologram). [snip] Thus, it is preferred that the holographic image 207 be a real image.
Quick review of holography: an extremely high resolution film takes pictures of the interference pattern generated when a coherent light beam strikes an object.
When coherent light of a similar wavelength later shines through this film, the interference patterns cause it to be shined through in exactly the same manner as the original coherent light, up to about half the resolution of the film. Most holographic film is 3000 lines per inch, so the hologram has a "resolution" of about 1500 lines per inch.
You see an image because the light reaching your eyes through the film is exactly as it would be had the object been in front of your eyes and illuminated by the original beam.
The light reaching your eyes is coming through the film and then traveling in a straight line from the film to your eyes. You can only see such light if the holograph is directly behind it, because the path of the photons cannot change after it passes through the hologram (disregarding minor lensing effects due to the atmosphere, that is)
What does this mean? Well if the hologram appears to be one half meter in front of you and the holographic film is one meter in front of you, and the holographic image appears to be 10 cm x 10 cm, then the minimum possible size for the holographic film is 20 cm x 20 cm.
I don't call that entirely independent; as a matter of fact, it's a pretty simple relationship governed by a version of the inverse square law.
Oh, an interesting fact about it is if you take a holographic film and cut it in half, because all the information about the image is stored throughout the film, you don't have half a hologram; you have a hologram of the entire object that is half the size of the original. Pretty cool stuff actually.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Is that the dude from Night Rider on this page?
Knight Rider 2003! Now with Holographic panel!
And if, by some fscked up logic, you are allowed to patent ideas that have no implementation, what's stopping all the movie producers who portrayed things like this in their movies from patenting this or any other idea seen in a futuristic movie. Hey, I got one... How 'bout patenting cyborgs? Hmmm... Good deal.
Even worse, someone can wait until the faster than light spaceship is invented, then use it to travel back in time and then patent it!
No, the patent office does not require working models any longer (not for quite some time). But I think that it could still be a good legal argument when defending against a patent that the patent holder did not really invent anything and that they just tried squatting on an idea (one that is hardly theirs), gave the public nothing of any value for the patent, and so are not entitled to patent protection when an unimplimented bit of sciece fantasy gets patented. I sure hope so, because unless these guys reallu have built The hologram projector 200 I would hate to see them profit on this any more than just bilking investors.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Okay, just assuming that this is a case in which they haven't invented anything, and it is actually a good idea [neither of which I feel able to judge], here is a workaround, NOW PUBLIC DOMAIN!
Instead of making holographic keypads, make use of the double-parabolic-mirror optical illusion. You know the kind, shown in Edmund Scientific, where there are floating coins in the air. That is clearly not a hologram, but it would work just as well.
If you feel at all inclined to make something, bookmark this reply!
- MickLinux
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Here is a summary of some people who have a real live working invention, not something they just thought up that might be possible one day
Free cell phone tracking
Well, the article says it is being done by the Airforce, on heads up displays, right? If this is so, then yes, it can be done. As to a copyright, well, the HUD thing is prior art, right?
Just some thoughts
Right now, the main limiting factor in PDA adoption (IMHO) is size. They're too darned big, they don't fit nicely into my pocket. Perhaps something the size of a credit card would be well protected in my wallet - but then the screen and input devices are too small -
Hence - this device would be the savior of the PDA industry.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
...I saw it demonstrated at SIGGRAPH last week. They projected a keyboard on a surface, and you could go up to it and "type" on the projection.
It worked quite well.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Then it would give new meaning to the term, "vaporware."
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Remember the iLoo concept from Microsoft UK? This is THE perfect input device. :-)
A usual film hologram (like those that have been around since 1940s) is made and placed somewhere.
Light shines on the hologram, producing a 3D image (you have seen it many times).
The image of the keypad is seen in front of the hologram (no, it doesn't float in the air, you have to look at the hologram to see it).
Infrared sensors (like those in the projection keyboards) detect the movement of your fingers.
The "key-press" is sent to the computer.
The inventors explain very well what this keyboard is. It is not the keyboard from Minority Report. It is a keyboard to be used in places where you don't want to actually touch surfaces for one reason or another.
This is an interesting invention that might prove useful in some areas.
There is nothing bad about the patent. Although inventors don't need to have a working model to get the patent (for 2 hundreds years already), this company has a working prototype (seen at the top of the article in NYT).
The media overstates the importance of this technology a bit.
The company has good PR manager.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.