A Touch Screen With Morphing Buttons

Al writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a touch screen that can also produce physical buttons. Graduate student Chris Harrison and professor Scott Hudson use a projector and infrared sensor below the screen to illuminate it and make it touch-sensitive, and the physical buttons are created using air pumps below the surface. They say this type of screen could be particularly useful when a simple, flat touch-screen is too distracting, for example in a vehicle dashboard."

Comments

Prius-Driving Moderators

[drinkypoo]

I just took a drive from Kelseyville, CA to Santa Cruz, CA (and back a couple days later) and on the way down my lady and I were treated to many spectacular feats of shitty driving. We laughed about it the whole way because every bad driver was a member of a class stereotyped as being unable to drive. First and foremost, the worst drivers were Prius Owners who otherwise did not seem to share any particular characteristics; they were split about evenly gender-wise, and were generally racially representative of the 101 corridor. The second-most prevalent group of bad drivers were women, followed by Asians and then Mexicans. The Mexicans may have been induced to drive worse because of the bizarre sight of two (and only two) white people in a Chevy Astro on the 101.

Obviously, some of those Prius drivers have mod points.

Anyway, there is one problem with your analysis: hippies can't afford a Prius, only yippies and dippies. And by dippies, I mean the people too stupid to crank the numbers on the energy consumption of the production of the vehicle and its fuel and compare them to the numbers on buying a Golf TDI, which runs on more energy-efficient fuel (and even biofuels from waste if you look around) and gets better mileage... and isn't full of batteries.