The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen

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."

Comments

Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards

[SimHacker]

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

[onemorehour]

What's special is that it can sense more than one point of contact at once.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this one special?
I've owned a multiple input touchscreen for some months now called the Lemur.
http://www.cycling74.com/products/lemur

The Lemur *is* special, as not only do you get multiple inputs, you also get them fast enough to perform with, and loads of presets for music apps.

Lemur++?

[Jeremi]

FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.