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

The Exploratorium had an exhibit like that

[SimHacker]

The Exploratorium in San Francisco had a multi-point touch screen paint system like this in the early 90's, which anyone could play with. It was really great, and quite elegant! It was running a fun program that let you paint with your fingertips, real paintbrushes dipped in water, as well as textured objects like a sponge and play-dough. It used an oblique video camera behind a plate of glass, and your fingers or the wet brush changed the index of refraction in a way that would show up brightly on the camera, and thus paint on the screen. There was no limit to the number of points you could paint at once, and what you could use as a brush was only limited by your imagination and what you could get away with in public: you could paint with brushes, sponges, clay, your fingertips, the palms of both hands, your face, your tongue, your boobs, greasy french fries and hamburger patties, or vomit on the screen to make interesting textures. (It's a good thing the Exploratorium makes everything robust, kid-proof, and easy to clean! I've been to some great parties at that place...)

-Don

Damnit!!!

[CatsupBoy]

Now my favorite touch screen gag is obsoleted:

User: This touch screen is awesome, but how do I right click on items?
Me: Use your right hand

*user stares blankly*

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.

May I suggest?

[Anti Frozt]

"I'd offer up organs for one of these things."

This being /., we all know which organ should be first to go, seeing as how it's the least used.

Re:May I suggest?

[utexaspunk]

That nobody ELSE uses it does not imply that it does not get used. I think it's safe to say that the organ which you imply gets used quite often by most /.ers...

Me too

[thefirelane]

I'd offer up organs for one of these things

Me too, just not mine.

Ba-Bing!

Wow

[Tom]

That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.

See, a lot of buttons on the mouse and on the screen are merely to differentiate between different actions, e.g. resize, fullscreen or close a window. More logical and intuitive options are possible with multitouch technology, e.g. as shown in the demos.

Re:fingerworks

[Ford Prefect]

Entirely different - it's based on something called 'frustrated internal reflection'. Simple version: you have a thin slab of transparent perspex with LEDs around the sides. The light from the LEDs is kept inside thanks to total internal reflection - it's a bit like a big flat piece of fibre optic cable in a sense.

When you place a finger or other appendage on the upper surface of the perspex, the total internal reflection breaks down and the fingertip (or whatever) gets illuminated - you track this with a camera pointing upwards at the perspex. To get the computer display gubbins, you also have a video projector pointing at the perspex.

I'm not sure how amenable it is to miniaturisation, but since it's used in fingerprint readers (without the video display) it's probably not too bad - presumably you'd have to change the projector and camera to flat equivalents, of course...

(Something I noticed on the page last week - a reference to work on identifying which finger is touching the display. He's updated that sentence to "Wouldn't it also be nice to identify which finger (e.g. thumb, index, etc.) is associated with each contact?" - but I'd had a sudden vision of this thing using fingerprints as, well, unique finger identification tags. The guy behind it seems pretty big on computer vision, and is also working on stuff like a "new generation of CMOS imaging sensors that feature on-board signal processing functionality, we are experimenting with creating a 1000fps non-invasive eye-tracker for under $100" - maybe some custom hardware for tracking and zooming in on the glowing fingerprints and identifying the fingers from there?)

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.

Re:Touchscreen keyboards

[murphyslawyer]

The difference is you could *totally* take down a Gibson with one of these puppies.

Minority Report

[tamnir]

After the initial "Oooooh, shiny! I'll give a kidney for one!" impulse, this reminds me quite a bit of the spiffy user interface in Minority Report, probably because of the intense arms-waving involved. So, makes me think the same too: very cool to see, but highly impractical. Your arms and shoulders would get painfully tired after just a few minutes using this...

So, I'll be keeping my kidney this time, thank you very much. I'll just go grab a box of tissues and watch the video again... ;-)

It'll never fly.

[doublem]

Let me spell it out:

Major technological innovations in computers and the Internet have been driven by porn. Adoption rates are, among most early adopters, driven by that technology's ability to deliver porn. This is true of Broadband, the early graphics card races, DVD drives and the Internet itself.

This interface requires two hands.

Need I say more?

Don't make me to spell it out in anatomical detail.

Re:It'll never fly.

[glsunder]

Major technological innovations in computers and the Internet have been driven by porn

In soviet russia, touch screen touches you?

I'd give my left hand

[mattnuzum]

I'd give my left hand for a two-handed touch screen. ;-)