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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.