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A Look Beneath the 'Surface'
Hajsky writes "Ars Technica takes a closer look at Microsoft's new "Surface" tabletop device. Turns out that Surface isn't actually a touchscreen at all, but uses five cameras located in the table's base to record movement and touch. 'The five cameras are near-infrared devices, but that's not because they are trying to read heat signatures from fingertips (or other body parts) on the table. Instead, it's because the entire surface of Surface is bathed in light; by illuminating the top of the table, the cameras can easily see when things are placed on it. Shining colored light across the surface of the table would spoil the effect that Microsoft wants, so near-infrared light is used for invisible illumination.' The whole setup runs on a Core 2 Duo and off-the-shelf hardware, and can handle 52 simultaneous touches." jfanning wrote with a link to an overview of similar technology used in the Helsinki 'CityWall'. The article she provides discusses the unique public display, and has an in-depth video on the way these kinds of setups work.
Jeff Han lead project at NYU to produce multi-touch display technology and some demo applications.
Take a look at the original work at NYU: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
And the spin-off company by the same guys to develop the technology: http://www.perspectivepixel.com/
Very cool stuff. If you look closely, you can tell that they're running it on GNU/Linux.
Hopefully, they'll chose to collaborate with the X and kernel guys to create proper generic interfaces for multi-touch pointing device input.
http://tinker.it/now/2007/02/28/multitouch-table-e xperiment/
- multi-touch-table/- projected-table-284137.php
* 1 panel of plexiglass 8mm thickness
* 2 strips of IR LEDs (18 LED per strip)
* 2 sheets of tracing paper
* 1 projector
* 1 mirror
* 1 analog camera sensitive to IR light
* 1 IR filter for the camera
* 1 computer
The traking was done using vvvv. http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php
==============
Also See:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/01/build-your-own
http://www.slashgear.com/make-your-own-multitouch
I can't help but wonder how they will compensate for parallax between users' eyes, fingertips, and the screen objects. I'd imagine that the display panel will be relatively thick for structural reasons and that most users will be sitting far off the central axis of the table (i.e., the coffee-table scenario). This means that the image on the screen will be displaced with respect to the line sight from eyeball to fingertip. Moreover different people sitting around the table will see different parallax displacements between fingertips and the screen. Without some compensation for this, the device will be frustrating to use because it won't be intuitive as to where to touch the table top to "touch" an underlying display object. People will often touch the screen where they think they should only to find they've grabbed the object next to the one they really wanted.
P.S. Acrylic is a horrible choice of material for the top as it scratches too easily.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Does anybody remember the HP touchscreen computer (from back in the Lisa days) which bombed miserably because people couldn't hold their arms up for hours on end? The thing about a mouse or trackball is that a little motion produces a lot of motion of the cursor - without fatigue.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
A camera doesn't just detect touch, it can detect movement, objects, people, etc. For example, if you where in a conference room, and someone lifted a chair to throw, then the cameras could identify the object being thrown, who is throwing it, and whom it was aimed at, and then play the appropriate sound file DUCK.wav!!!
Could this be a forerunner of a gaming tabletop? All the terrain, units and record keeping are kept for you as you play on a largish surface. Could be pretty cool.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The cameras and the IR light source are all inside of the table. You can see this from the diagrams. Nice try though.
If you understood the implications at all you would see that there are benefits for collaborative computing. Have you ever sat around a table (implying the involvement of others) with a pile of photos? Without multitouch you can't pull off the same level of interactivity with a computer screen.
Yes yes, there are fairly ancient examples of similar interfaces - but none of them have made it to the home or even business market, so this is an utterly irrelevant datum.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, great. So my carpet becomes the power cord and my coffee spill now becomes my death.
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
I could go on and on. None of this is really mindblowing, but there could be a very decent cottage industry popping up around this one item alone.