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

Re:Hasn't this been done already?

[Hadlock]

These are commercially available for schools already. Whiteboard manufacturers are buying this off the shelf to integrate with their existing whiteboard systems; they use IR emitters/sensors and hooks up via USB as a standard USB HID multitouch device.