Slashdot Mirror
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]."
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...
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
So what happens when these are built into the furniture and the "mouse" goes bad? Will you need to buy a new desk?
Because it's much easier to clean a flat surface rather than a keyboard, or even a mouse.
Well, I'd imagine it would be a trivial task to build a small, textured rubber keyboard template that could be placed on a desk, thus providing the necessary tactile feedback. Make it dishwasher safe, and voila, you have a cheap, easy-to-sterilize keyboard.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
when someone bumps my desk?asldku o0q3ueoaufhaslkfhslr8yrlkZDBSKDfjg24kadj fopwea5 948a a;ljkfh ap085u;dIAsdl;h;oduY*()~#)98UWO;ERIUWE;LKJ W;ELRI EW DAMN IT!
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.