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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!
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
The speed of sound in wood is approx 0.6-5 km/s making it not only highly anisotropic (due to the grain structure) but also giving it a long wavelength (20-160 cm @ 3 kHz).
Sorry; blame physics.
I propose scratch 'n' navigate.
...has an institute devoted to hydrocloric acid? Talk about specialization gone mad.
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.
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.
Except that this has already been accomplished, which already scratches that particular itch, man. Sorry. :)
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.