Touch Screen Tech Comes of Age

pottercw writes "Good summary of today's touch-screen technologies on Computerworld — the obvious Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface, plus projected touch screens (nothing for users to break), handheld devices that you control from the back (so your fingers don't obscure the screen), and of course giant multitouch walls a la Minority Report. Anyone got $100K?"

Comments

$100k? Try $40!

[Roger W Moore]

I don't have $100k but I do have $40, a web browser and a basic knowledge of electronics. If you do too you might want to try this link.

Re:$100k? Try $40!

[fictionpuss]

Since when does a Wii cost $40?

It doesn't - from the linked article: "NOTE: For most of these projects, you don't need the Nintendo Wii console. You only need the Wii controller and a bluetooth connection."

Re:$100k? Try $40!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried it. While it makes for a cool mini-project, the final result isn't really good/accurate enough to be practical for a lot of the things you'd want a touchscreen for, even with perfect positioning of the wiimote, which takes some work to accomplish.

Where are these "researchers?"

[hakubi]

Am I the only one that remembers the episode of "Beyond 2000" where there was a guy showing a CRT touch screen that could support three points of contact? This would have been somewhere in the range of 14-15 years ago. To say that putting this in a cellular phone is revolutionary like saying the same thing about VOIP. Sorry, it's evolutionary at best.

please....MS Surface is not touch

[Anonymous Coward]

"the obvious Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface

Once again - MS Surface has nothing to do with touching. There are 7 cameras below the glass that track and feed movement. The glass is the point reference and is not configured to detect or relay any physical content. It's just a big ass table with old tech stuffed inside.

So many punsters read so many reviews of tech products and believe so much MS hype without paying attention to what they are reading. MS seems to rely on that, by the way, and what a business model that must be in detail :)

Re:JCL5M for the win.

[ehrichweiss]

Yes, they work pretty damn well though they have a few limitations depending on how you implement them. Mine uses/used velcro straps to hold it to the screen but I found that it was prone to slippage and I'd have to recalibrate several times per session. So then I "integrated" it by removing the actual touchscreen from its frame and then installing it under the bezel of my laptop; that didn't take long to do but it did take some engineering to anchor the touchscreen so it wouldn't slide under the bezel. As for brands, mine is a Keytec Magic Touch(www.magictouch.com) and you can find them for about $210-ish if you check out their resellers.

The driver that comes with it is alright but there are others available for free(and some for SERIOUS $$$) if you are willing to do some experimentation. I found that the original driver has some limitations that I don't care for in how it senses a touch-on/touch-off so I had to set the driver to "Move-only" and then used the keyboard(and a macro program called AutoIt) to control the mouse click aspect of it. I haven't yet tried but there seem to be some awesome Linux drivers for it that are much more configurable.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need to know anything specific.