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Acoustic Sensors Make Any Surface a Touch Pad
An anonymous reader writes "Using cheap acoustic sensors the surface of any 3D object can be instantly made into a touch-sensitive interface capable of tracking two objects at once. Its creators are planning to make hospitals more hygienic — keyboards and mice will be replaced by desks wired to perform as keyboards and touchpads. A video shows it in action [.wmv]."
no one (not even your computer) can hear you typing!
Hospitals? Not the first application that would have come to mind, but a little extra hygiene never hurt anyone. (Cue jokes about Slashdotters) I'm more interested in the portable computing applications. Does this mean that we could sit down at Starbucks, whip out a PDA equipped with this device, and have the table surface become a full-sized keyboard/mouse arrangement? That would be sweet!
I'd be interested in knowing what would happen when someone turned on the radio and they started playing GWAR...
Hospitals are dirty becuase they outsource their cleaning to companies that employ mostly low paid, un(der)trained staff.
Did anyone else notice that the video doesn't show then using the corners of the touchable region? I'm curious whether the system is reliable when one sensor is very close to the source of the vibrations.
"The whole surface of your desk could become your keyboard and mouse-pad."
The video and descriptions show only a flat surface of a 3D object. All real objects are 3D, but few have empty flat surfaces across their entire working area.
Will this thing work with the 3D surface of my cluttered desk? I doubt it will track the position of my fingertips on a piece of paper after I've picked it up from the desk, without sensors attached to the paper.
When these sonar sensors can actually track objects inside a 3D volume, not just across a surface in 3D space, they'll have made a major leap in UI. Until then, I don't see how these sensors are different from the touchscreen bezels mounted on monitors for years, except they've figured out how to discard the frame, and supposedly do without calibration.
--
make install -not war
This is clear discrimination against Ninjas, who obviously don't make a sound even when playing a round of quake.
Meta, Meta, Meta
I've already seen laser keyboards that spread over a flat surface for PDAs. I wonder how they sense where you are typing, but now that I think about it, I would like to have a silent keyboard. I just wonder how difficult it is to type when you can't get a physical feel for the keyboard.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So what happens when these are built into the furniture and the "mouse" goes bad? Will you need to buy a new desk?
So, according to you, an entity cannot be "low paid" and "clean." Right? But I can assure you that when death is demanding a visit to your household, you will not think of the "cleanliness" you appear to crave.
On the other hand I have an issue with the headline. Consider:
When shall we have a video in an Open Source format like .ogg? If slashdot could transform the videos to open source formats before posting the stories, this could be a very welcome development.
Because it's much easier to clean a flat surface rather than a keyboard, or even a mouse.
Whatever the touchable surface is, it will have germs.
And NOT because of the poorly paid staff.
The source of germs in hospitals is SICK PEOPLE. Come on folks, how long are we going to let these sickos with their sniffles and oozing infections dirty up our hospitals ? I think we need a fence, and strick jail-the-ill legislation with no possibility of parole.
Yeah, or you could have a membrane keyboard, like they do at fast food restaurant cash registers. If the solution already exists, and has existed for decades, why hasn't it been implemented? So some high-dollar high-tech overkill solution can be found instead?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This is not the first keyboard implementation without a physical keyboard. There have been others that use optics which would be a lot more reliable since accoustics change with simple things such as background noise, the shape of the room, and even the surface being used. The big issue is whether people are comfortable using it. When other implementations have come up, people just didnt like the feel of hitting the solid material. Most slashdotters probably spend a bit of time figuring out what keyboard "feels" best to them just as people do with mattresses. However, I highly doubt anyone has an ideal keyboard that gives no tactile response. Although it may seem simple to change this precedence, I would note the USAs insistance on not using metric, and the fact that we still use QWERTY keyboards that were designed to be inefficient so that typewriters would not jam. I just don't see this past a niche market.
Very cool idea, I wonder how well it deals with ambient mechanical noise? Just think, you set down your coffee cup and a mysterious message appears telling you to "follow the white rabbit" or perhaps some indecipherable gibberish like "411 uR b42e R 0wnz3rd" or something.
While this point may be true in some cases, it's only part of the issue. There is a significant difference between dirty and unsterile. Cleanliness isn't the real problem, it's sterility.
It is far easier to sterilize a flat durable solid surface than something convuluted and fragile like a keyboard. So, this is a great thing. And of course it has so many many many more applications too.
Couldn't you combine this with a projector to make a wall you can "paint"? Could be great fun.
Great for kids too - finger painting on the wall without making a mess.
Combined with a flat monitor as the desk, this is Star Trek LCARS right there. Re-configurable at the touch of a button, your keyboard /mouse can be anything. And this doesn't cost hundreds for OLED keys either.
Count me in when they have a big keyboard working for this. But if it's acoustics, how do you get a key-repeat?
The best-paid, best-trained cleaning staff in the world isn't going to be able to get all the germs out of every nook and cranny of a keyboard. By contrast, even the lowest-paid, least-trained cleaners can probably figure out how to wipe down a flat, seamless desk with disinfectant.
Now if a slashsdot editor went to the trouble of requesting permission to host the video (the benefit to the video owner is to stave off
:wq
Underpaid staff is not the only problem. I remember having read that doctor's neckties were nice contamination vector for several kind of germs, but this is as offtopic as your point.
Some 20 years ago, when electronic daisywheel typewriters were starting to take over, Smith-Corona/Marchant came out with a novel way to keep using their mechanical typewriter tooling. They used a conventional mechanical keyboard, where the keys stuck a bar of steel with a piezoelectric sensor at either end.
The delay between the time the impulse reached each sensor enabled a microprocessor to pinpoint exactly where the bar was impacted, and thus deduce which key was pressed.
That's basically the same principle applied, but in three dimensions.
A better way to improve keyboard hygiene in hospitals would be for everyone to have his own personal keyboard, operated by the hand that holds it and carried in a pocket, wireless of course. Something like mine at chordite.com :-)
But what hospitals really need is a way to sterilize hands up to the elbows in about 3 seconds. Think of boxes in the halls with holes you stick your arms into. When you press a foot pedal the boxes somehow magically *poof* and you're clean. Not perfectly clean of course but as clean as a current surgical scrub. If the boxes were handy enough and safe enough for doctors and nurses to use between visits on their rounds, hospitals wouldn't be infecting everybody like they are now.
The beauty of Open Source is that you yourself are welcome to accomplish this feat any time you wish. You appear to have a computer, so you are most of the way there already, unless you cannot code and refuse to learn how, in which case you are part of the problem.
Keyboards and drinks have always been natural enemies. O yes, being able to whipe your desk IS going to be easier than to clean a keyboard, and I'll be thankfull JUST for that. But enemies they will stay.... I can just look forward to colleges placing their coffee mug on the reboot corner of my desk.
.. who was forced to clean tomato juice off a very dusty keyboard once!
-ph
2. Adapt it for use in health care.
3. Profit!
Seriously, though... any would-be inventors would be wise to keep that in mind. If you think the Pentagon overpays for a toliet seat, wait to you see what a hospital spends on one.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
good read, but . . .
the basic problem with all touchpads, regardless of who makes them or how they are used,
is that they can become a window for RF signals into your computer.
for example, some people experience crazy cursors whenever someone uses a cell phone nearby,
because the RF signal from the phone invades the trackpad.
all this interesting article points up is really that trackpads are very easy to exploit for other
purposes.
i wonder just when someone will hack a way to get into someone's computer hard drive via the
trackpad or wacom tablet.
and why isn't there a notice/warning on all laptops about this weakness of the trackpads
open to RF signals?
does the FCC even know about this?
or is it an urban legend?
regards,
roger born
"sorry, no refunds."
...the nurses ? ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
Roland patented and employed a suspiciously similar tech years ago for their V-Drum electronic percussion system. Perhaps Roland's patents only apply to musical instruments, but the concept of deriving placement and distance from piezo electric sensors is nothing new.
Elo Touchsystems / Tyco already has a product out there that works exactly this way...and a myriad of patents. Acoustic Pulse Recognition: http://media.elotouch.com/pdfs/marcom/apr_wp.pdf
It's a relatively new product but it's already way past the research stage and well into production.
So, according to you, an entity cannot be "low paid" and "clean."
That is not what I said.
please re-read my post.
But I can assure you that when death is demanding a visit to your household, you will not think of the "cleanliness" you appear to crave.
I refuse to die in a hospital. Hospitals are full of sick people, and a sizable majority that are admitted, die there. A significant percentage of those that die in hospital would have survived had they stayed at home.
I eschew drugs unless as an absolute last resort, unlike so many Westerners these days who seem quite happy to self medicate with OTC concoctions at the least symptom and turn to the doctor for prescription medication to cure everything from a head-ache, insomnia, fatigue, and malaise to spoiled children, when usually all that is needed is a good diet, exercise, fresh air and hard work, and in the case of spoiled children, a firm hand.
We already have tons and tons of keyboards and many ways of manifesting them (see the laser keyboard and membrane keyboard noted above). What about customizable interfaces? As an artist and quasi-musician I am particularly interested in being able to customize my sonar interface to be implemented across my desktop as a personally intuitive keyboard, canvas, whatever.
... play FPS with my airsoft gun (using these and some perspex in from of the screen)
when someone bumps my desk?asldku o0q3ueoaufhaslkfhslr8yrlkZDBSKDfjg24kadj fopwea5 948a a;ljkfh ap085u;dIAsdl;h;oduY*()~#)98UWO;ERIUWE;LKJ W;ELRI EW DAMN IT!
As willing as he may be to do that, it may not be possible.
I cannot watch this wmv due to codec issues. No 64 bit wmv codec for me.
Go back to trolling, asshat
What is that I don't get is why not just publish the thing to Google or Youtube. Not only would that make it easier for everyone to view (except for those old folks who hate flash regardless of the fact it can be run on Win, OS X, and Linux without fighting over Divx, WMV, or Quicktime codecs), but it would also save them an arm and a leg with bandwidth costs.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Now it's at...yes, yes...no, still 3KB a second.
And the majority of cleaners will clean around a computer, and not even move a keyboard to clean under never mind clean any part of it.
I don't know why this is, but its either because they've been asked not to, its their policy or they're just too scared in case they break something.
So like you said a flat desk is much easier, and it will actually get done
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning...
Seems like I could hide a gadget under a desk that could tell what you were writing on it. Or what keys you were pressing on a keyboard resting on it. Or what they're writing on the whiteboard on the shared wall.
Of course I'd just use it so I could tell what my employees were IM-ing during the meetings, but my first thought was not cleaner keyboards.
Then again, it might be useful in certain niche applications - hospitals (as TFA suggests), shop floors (where most users aren't touch-typists and environmental conditions are less than optimal for computing equipment), quick access on the fly (the "Starbucks" example being cited elsewhere). All the same, I don't think I'll bother running out and getting one anytime soon!
It looks interesting, but I wonder if it can be pressure sensetive (i.e. can detect how hard one is pressing on the surface based on the vibrations). I'm thinking of the artistic applications for this as a way to replace expensive Wacom tablets that come in set sizes of just a few inches with a single product that can be set up to simulate a canvas of any size. But in order for that to be a practical replacement for most artists, it would need to be able to sense the force being applied to the surface (for lighter and darker shades or textures to be applied in the brushstrokes).
I wonder if this would also then allow different tools such as actual paint-brushes (which I presume have a different acoustic profile than say, a stylus or a finger) to be used as different inputs to get different brushstrokes. I also wonder what the effective range of these tools could be, as in do they lose detail or accuracy outside a certain distance, or could they be placed at the four corners of a room to track footsteps? Lots of different applications I can think of, but the one most useful to me is the artistic tablet replacement. My keyboard works just fine, and my desk gets a bit too cluttered to want to devote its entirety to becoming a UI system (at least not all the time), but if this tool could be developed to replace the keyboard, mouse, and tablet all at once (and cost-effectively) then I think they could be on to something I'd defintely be interested in.
After the cleaners visit our offices there's a good few hours of calls regarding broken keyboards/mice/monitors/PCs. Generally just cables pulled - but the state on LCDs after a being subjected to cleaning fluids designed for CRTs numerous times is not pretty. For that reason, they are banned from entering our lab.
We've raised the issue, changed cleaning firms - all the same.
Am I the only person who thought unbreakable DDR pad when I read this?
Sweet, now I can have a keyboard like the boss in TRON!!!!@!@! My childhood fantasies are slowly coming true. Now all I need is a room full of computers and hot girls. Oh wait, I read slashdot, guess I'll settle for the room full of computers.
Everything, since they made the typewriting machine is confined to a keyboard interface.
The first thing I thought about when I saw this was "a wider keyboard", then "a cheaper keyboard", then "a smaller laptop".
But WTF is a Keyboard???? Just some Human-Machine Interface they made two centuries ago!
With this new concept, we can virtaully define the interface upon the needs of the soft that need to be run
Do you realize??
sigh
Oh, and... "Imagine actual sex." I do, all the time. :)
Main problem with this is fighting the noise. The limitation on areas and input devices has a positive effect of reducing noise.
When garcon will close couple of your applications by serving your latte you will know.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
http://multimedia.cx/eggs/hooking-up-the-smpte-vc- 1-decoder-in-ffmpeg/
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the surface of any 3D object
Technically, Everything real is a 3d object, even a piece of tissue paper. You can round it down to having 0 depth, but if you stack 10,000 pieces of tissue paper on top of each other, you get a tangible, measurable thickness.
Now, I'm not recommending using tissue paper for touchpads, I'm just pointing out the fact that everything in our domain of existence is 3d. Now, of course, objects on our computer screens, however 3d they may appear, are actually 2d, being made up of only by light. The computer screens themselves, of course, are 3d.
It's been my experience that cleaning people use the same dirty rag to clean your monitor that they just used to clean the last 10 dirty desks.
I didn't know it took much training to push a mop around. I better get trained the next time i decide to clean the house or i might do it wrong!
And they are only allowed to come out once the get better.
So, according to you, an entity cannot be "low paid" and "clean."
:-)
That is not what I said.
please re-read my post.
But I can assure you that when death is demanding a visit to your household, you will not think of the "cleanliness" you appear to crave.
I refuse to die in a hospital. Hospitals are full of sick people, and a sizable majority that are admitted, die there. A significant percentage of those that die in hospital would have survived had they stayed at home.
While I don't know if this statement is true or not, however the question you should be asking is how many people died at home that would not have died if they were in a hospital.
I eschew drugs unless as an absolute last resort, unlike so many Westerners these days who seem quite happy to self medicate with OTC concoctions at the least symptom and turn to the doctor for prescription medication to cure everything from a head-ache, insomnia, fatigue, and malaise to spoiled children, when usually all that is needed is a good diet, exercise, fresh air and hard work, and in the case of spoiled children, a firm hand.On this I agree with you.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
yeah, I guess the idea is that it's easier to sterilize a flat desk surface than a traditional keyboard. However, I avoid touching keyboards/mice in hospital / public situations as much as possible, but I might be more likely to mistakenly put my donut right on a surface that is actually someone's acoustic keyboard area. Furthermore, if hospitals really were interested in keeping keyboards sterile, there certainly have been ways to go about this (think 2second bleach rag wipedown of your speak n' spell keyboard after your kid sister puked on it) but apparantly very little marketable interest in it - not sure why they would choose to grab up this technology over any other.
ôó
The first two shapes drawn in the video begin with a distinct rap to the geometric centre of the surface. In fact, there are markings on the surface showing where the centre is. (The last two shapes aren't shown from the very beginning).
It could be that the system has a harder time distinguishing the start of a stroke than it does staying "locked on" during a stroke. Once it's locked on, possible signals that are very close to the last known position could be weighted much higher than signals arising just anywhere on the surface. That might even be why they are starting in the centre. Perhaps the system has a poor signal/noise ratio and doesn't reliably detect randomly located starts. Poor signal/noise ratio would also explain why they are rapping the surface distictly at the start.
It's a very cool demonstration but I'm suspicious they are cheating a bit here.
Back in the days of DOS/WfW3.11 there were ultrasonic digitizers which used transducers to make 2D and 3D digitizers of very good accuracy for CAD/CAM work.
Already been done, already been on the market, and I even think the basics of the technology were covered in Byte back in the day.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I would be more interested in technology that can add quasi-3D tactile sense to a touch display. I have been using resistive touch screens with my fingertips for a long time I truly believe that they are more intuitive (eye candyish buttons that you can press are just irresistable) and more practical especially in cramped spaces. For the market to try this of course it would miracle of course, and I think that is in the form of tactile feedback to assure them what their fingers are actually touching... At the moment there is too much potential confusion as to how much pressure is needed, where the cursors is under the mass of fleshed pressed against the screen etc..
I could conceive of two ways this could be achieved, passive where the whole screen receives a vibration based on movement (essentially how tactile mice work), and active where a grid of buzzers paint the landscape.
I don't see how holograms are ever going to turn holodecks in the foreseeable future so I do think touch displays are an important platform to develop.
Hopefully the acoustic sensors can also pick up my screams of agony as I bash away on my hard-as-nails desktop, inducing even more swelling and pain without the benefit of the bio-feedback keys can give. Perhaps there could be a 'strain gauge' projected on the desk or even clicks related to the pressure used to hit the keys. Yes you should be able to mute this, but just think of the fun you would have if you linked this into a midi device. All those times you've drummed your fingers with boredom - now you could entertain everyone by tapping out Rachmaninov on your lap at the bus stop. Hang on I've hit on a solution, just project the keyboard on your thighs - instant bio-feedback and perfect keyboard posture!
my Minority Report-style desktop UI?
Seriously, this could bode well for the whole idea of integrating the physical interface with the virtual system, as it's a very adaptable, less constrained design. Sorting objects (files) by physically moving them, zooming in by tapping on an object, sculpting/3D design by actually manipulating a physical object... and I haven't even touched on (no pun intended) the potential porn aspects... the mind boggles...
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
"The source of germs in hospitals is SICK PEOPLE. Come on folks, how long are we going to let these sickos with their sniffles and oozing infections dirty up our hospitals ?"
The insurance companies are right on that. Pretty soon, only healthy people will be able to get insurance, QED no sickos in hospitals. Problem solved.
(But I don't like to be original, if the original post was dead on. Thanks, posting master control program!)
But when was the last time you saw a /. editor willing to validate, proofread, or desensationalize a story let alone contact someone, ask for permission, download, transcode, and host a video? Back to never again. :)
Don't forget check for dupes
"You're arguing for a universe with fewer waffles in it," I said. "I'm prepared to call that cowardice."