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Researchers Turn Tables and Walls Into "Scratch Input" Surfaces
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute have developed a new input technology that allows mobile devices to use surfaces they rest on, like tables, for gestural finger input. This is achieved with some clever acoustic tricks — basically taking advantage of high frequency sound propagation through dense materials. Their video highlights some neat applications, such as controlling an MP3 player by scratching on a wall and muting a cell phone by scratching on a table. Further details are available in the academic paper (PDF)."
Gives a whole new meaning to DIY devices from scratch!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Imagine the educational possibilities of using a chalkboard for that purpose!
I wonder if 3 stethoscopes could provide enough accuracy to turn your desk into a large drawing tablet.
And show porn websites when another phone sitting on the same table vibrates?
these sorts of hidden interfaces worry me.
If we come to expect interfaces to devices to be hidden and embedded in desktops and surrounding walls we are going to spend half our lives scratching and poking at inanimate things.
I am all for integration of technology but things like this and the hidden table things will just make us look stupid.
give us clear interfaces on recognisable devices so that we understand what we are doing.
liqbase
I propose scratch 'n' navigate.
If a loud-mouthed schnook is yakking in public and I punch him in the nose, will that turn off his cellphone?
...has an institute devoted to hydrocloric acid? Talk about specialization gone mad.
... can come with a full keyboard. Just set the thing on the table, and a laser diode outlines your keyboard for you on the table, and you type. Yeah, you'll get fatigue from too much typing like this, but it'll be tons faster than point and click.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This has potential for a door lock. A cute application would be something that opens the door when the dog wants to go out. But scratch recognition without location information is going to be very limited in application.
With some positional information, it could be more useful. The speed of sound in wood is high, so you're going to have to correlate waveforms, not just time events. But that's not hard to do. I have no idea how much accuracy you could get, but it's not an expensive experiment to find out. Try four microphones at the corners of a table and correlate to line up the waveforms. (Three are enough for position, but with four, you get redundancy and can eliminate totally bogus position results.) Multi-touch is going to be hard, though.
It might be fun to set up a DJ mixing rig this way. No turntables, just a flat surface, maybe with outlines of turntables and faders to guide navigation.
Won't a vibrating phone with this technology enabled cause some issues? Or not cleanly picking up the phone might end a call.
And another thing - how long before some huge corporation buys the rights to this technology (or patents it) and puts this out of reach of most consumers?
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
It seems they basically reinvented what Sensitive Objects (and probably others) already does...
It seems hard to find on their site a specific mention of gestures, but I had an interview there and specifically asked if they were able to track "drags" and not only "clicks" and they said they were able to follow a finger on the surface.
Also, look for Tai-Chi (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction).
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I read most of the-friendly-headline, and I have to say I think it's cool that researchers can take time out of their busy lives (you know, researching) and enjoy a relaxing hobby like DJ'ing.
The article says this researches has accomplished "gestural finger input". Although this would be very cool, it is not the case. The only thing this researcher has done is listening for sound, and if there's sound, do stuff. Compare it to the microphone input of the DS: if there's noise, you can do stuff, if there's no noise, do nothing. What the researcher added was a bit of complexity: a short noise changes mode, and a long noise activates the mode. That's nowhere near gestural input.
In fact, even if they had used 3 microphones (which would allow for random gestural input), the precision with realistic hardware on, for example, plastics, would be about an inch, or a couple of centimeters best case scenario. Forget about gestures on concrete walls.
Yay, now I can mute my phone by scratching the table instead of pressing a button! A new milestone in user-friendliness!
What's up with the "inputdev" tag? Are we still working with 8-character limits? :/ I know this is a geek site, but I find it so annoying - why can't it be "inputdevices" or something.
... point this at someones face.
Here be signatures
From the article's title. What more need be said?
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
I see so many new applications, improvements, and developments out there, and nine-nines of them never make it to consumer use, or even to specialized uses in specific labs and industries.
I realize (from above) that this isn't new, but it's new to me, and it looks like a very, very interesting interface. Virtual keyboards? Too esoteric, even for a geek like me. Gestural control? No. I've tried those mouse-gesture control thingy's, and they're okay, but too intrusive. But if I could merely tap, click or trace on ANYTHING... now that's something I could readily and easily incorporate into my interface!
I hope CM pulls an MIT and makes sure this gets a real chance at flowering. Heck, even the non-geeks out there can tap a finger, can't they? Hmmm... paraplegics? What a boon!
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
Am I the only one who misread "Turn Table" as the round disk with rhythms?