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Wiimote Turns TV into Touchless MS Surface
RemyBR writes "User interface project allows you to control objects on a display using gestures, working like Microsoft's Surface but without touching the screen at all. Inspired by Johnny Chung Lee's work, the system requires you to wear Minority Report-style gloves equipped with infrared emitters on your fingertips. A Wiimote on top of the display keeps track of these IR LEDs, while the software can read the motion down to two-finger pinching gestures for image zooming."
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Nintendo turns your televisions into a Microsoft product!
Would it be possible to shine IR light through the edge of a plexiglass surface, and then when the user touches the surface it would cause the IR to scatter at that point creating a point source for the Wiimote to track?
If the video crashes at some point, a quick recap: it kinda works. You can see at certain points, the images get dropped and it looks like it doesn't totally track perfectly with where the fingers vs. screen are. However, it is an awesome technology and idea... maybe with a couple of remotes you could triangulate more precisely and get that true 'minority report' feel... just what i need for my tri-monitor setup :)
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If you saw it three weeks ago, then why didn't you post it? Oh, you were too lazy? Then STFU.
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Uhhh... no. This article links to a previous article, which links to the article you linked to. Each of these articles shows a progressive evolution of the concept. The article you linked to used reflective tape to accomplish the IR tracking. The article linked to by this article shows how to use a light pen for greater accuracy. THIS article combines the two approaches using IR equipped gloves to create a highly accurate touch surface.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A desktop on a desktop on a desktop....
A duck was found murdered in a chicken coop last night. Police suspect foul play.
Why not just use the Wiimote itself as a remote control? It seems more fun and practical.
If you saw it three weeks ago, then why didn't you post it? Oh, you were too lazy? Then STFU.
Because I didn't think it was worth discussing on Slashdot? Perhaps because in the past when I've submitted what I thought was pretty cool shit it was rejected within minutes or rejected and then posted a few days later by someone else instead that had, what I felt to be, a lame writeup?
But most of all it's because I can't stand the fact that some of the writeups are nothing more than blog advertisements that link to the real article and they continue to get pushed through seemingly w/o even hitting the firehose.
We're used to moving an actual thing around to do stuff. The physical reaction into our fingers is very important. The mouse gives a minimum, but the trackpad gives more. Touchless manual gestures don't keep the hands locked in a feedback loop with the virtual object, so they'll be clumsy.
What I'm waiting for is a thin memory plastic layer over a touchscreen, that can raise bumps and edges defining onscreen GUIs. Vibrating gloves could be good for simulating textures, but there's no tech for simulating tensile or inertial force in virtual objects. Maybe some kind of eccentric gyroscope, but I've never seen one.
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An updated version of this video has been posted to the Cynergy Labs Site. http://labs.cynergysystems.com/
A better explanation of how he built this can be found here and a better video with a cool example of navigating a 3D object can be found at the Cynergy Labs site.
Ok I get it. You can make multitouch interfaces. I have made multitouch interfaces myself using a couple different methods.
They aren't worth a damn though unless you have something to use them with. Where is the multitouch picture organizing software that I can display on my coffee table and let me family sort through the pictures. Where is the multitouch D&D program that will let me and my friends move our characters through a dungeon with miniatures? Where is the multitouch coloring book that I can put a bunch of kids on? Multitouch math races? Multitouch Chemical Compound manipulation?
We need software. We have ways to interact now. We need things to interact with.
Two words: tired arms.
Unfortunately, these sort of interfaces suffer from the same problems that doomed touch screen and light pens 20 years ago ("They can just touch the screen! How easy is that??") Users liked them at first, but holding your arm up is tiring. Try reaching out to your monitor and trace your Slashdot window for five minutes and see how long you last. It's *hard*.
There's a reason people in the Old Days wrote on flat tables, and didn't write on easels. That's also why artists who do use easels typically do "stroke and rest" (and why cartoonists use a flatter table)
A touch table is far superior for this sort of thing for that reason.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I hope the gloves incorporate rumble. That's my favourite aspect of the Wii OS. Feeling that little bump when you scroll the cursor over a button is so tactile and tangible. It reinforces that you should immediately pay attention because you're about to execute a command.
For my undergrad digital hardware project, I made one of these act as a Macintosh mouse. That was cool my professor let me get away with such an easy project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove
You could have a very large vocabulary of gestures by using finger positions like modifier keys. Apparently, the native resolution of the Power Glove is 8 bit. This might not sound like much, but with a smoothing function like the one used for SmartNav head pointing devices, you can emulate much higher resolutions very well. (I got my girlfriend one of these because of her RSI, and I can tell you, it works very well, even though SmartNav's native resolution is only VGA.)
Please stop referring to any multi-touch device as being like the "Microsoft Surface". MS did not come up with the idea of a multi-touch display. They steal and buy 99+ % of their technologies. Let's get PC and stop giving credit where it isn't due. It is a "multi-touch" surface. Not an MS Surface. /rant
Perhaps those eight days would have been better spent caring for the screaming child in the background.
I got to play with the Microsoft touch at CES. This is nothing like it. The MS table uses a camera underneath the screen, so it can do things like recognize physical objects. Imagine thumbing through artwork on the table, then putting your wireless MP3 player down on the table and dragging the artwork to it and having it wirelessly sync. Pretty cool, if you ask me. They demoed this at CES. Basically anything with a barcode can be recognized as a unique device. Without this type of physical object recognition, the Wii version is a poor substitute, besides the fact you can't actually use all 10 fingers (or 20, if there are two of you) at once.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw Good lord this is cool. And he is right - bring on the games!!!!
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Interesting, except for the constant microsoft advertisement. "I love flash, but we built this in silverlight (continue on to long rant about how great that is with no relation to the topic whatsoever)", or the "and since it's built in .net it can communicate with the Wiimote", err yes? What's that gotta do with .net? Then the "oh, look a picture of me at some microsoft meeting", and on and on. All that really got on my nerves about 3/4 through the video.
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