Creating a "Force Field" Invisible Touch Interface

angry tapir writes "Using infrared sensors like the ones on television remote controls, Texas A&M University students presented an inexpensive multitouch system at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Vancouver. 'I like to consider it an optical force field; it's like a picture frame where we shoot thousands of light beams across and we can detect anything that intersects that frame,' said Jonathan Moeller, a research assistant in the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. The frame is lined with 256 IR sensors, which are connected to a computer. When ZeroTouch is mounted over a traditional computer screen it turns the display into a multitouch surface. Taken one step further, if the screen is suspended then a user could paint a virtual canvas."

Comments

Hasn't this been done already?

[honestmonkey]

I swear we used to have these at work, 10-15 years ago. They were not multi-touch, but that was likely due to the computer interface (serial) and the perhaps more primitive technology at the time. But I'm pretty sure the sensors were infra-red. As I recall, it wasn't necessarily the most accurate system. So, these guys just improved it a bit, or is this truly "revolutionary"?