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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."
The question is, will it drive down the price of devices with multitouch capability?
More specifically, could we see this being applied in a competitor to Microsoft Surface anytime soon?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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"?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Don't hold back... tell us how you really feel.
Seriously... what is your problem with this? If you read the article and watched the video, you'd likely see that the applications for this are enormous.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Also, FYI.. these guys are re-inventing the wheel... so, sadly, it's not even new: http://www.irtouch.com/
No wait -- a roaring lion!
Better: a subordinated debenture.
I mean, if we're going to just go making up shit like "force field" when characterizing a simple grid of eye-beam sensors...
(Hint: where does the "force" come in?)
And yes, the earliest touch-screen technologies were essentially exactly this sort of light-beam interruptor laid near the surface of a CRT. They were soon replaced by surface-acoustical-wave systems and even capacitive feedback through the cathode beam itself.
Urg.
Bear in mind that something doesn't have to always utilize cutting edge technology to find a new market.
Consider also that factors may have been present that caused the technology to not live up to any major expectations in the 80's which may not be applicable today.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That seems to be the consensus. What are we to do?
Sig: I stole this sig.
I'm not a huge fan of personal attacks, but you've got to admit, the guy's right.. this stuff is really very old stuff... it's not even marginally innovative.
Doesn't work in the sun, for one thing. For another, it's necessarily going to be pretty bulky; it's not suitable for mobile applications. Since your finger has to interrupt the beam, there will necessarily be a ridge around the outside of your viewing area, which will attract dirt and grime, which will interrupt the IR beams. The resolution is exactly equal to the number of IR senors that you stack around the outside of the thing; it doesn't exactly scale well.
It's not exactly ground-breaking tech. It's simple enough to be suitable for an undergraduate project, but the applications in industry are extremely limited.
Old stuff is not necessarily bad stuff... I'm at a complete loss as to how this technology could not be viably used to make large multitouch displays more economically viable than the outrageously priced Microsoft Surface.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yeah, that Make comment is about right. I could probably throw one of these together given an arduino, an afternoon, and a handful of IR sensors. Not exactly groundbreaking...
I was thinking of it more for applications that weren't mobile... like a touch-screen desk surface.
Resolution was initially a concern of mine as well when I saw the article, until I saw the video and with only 256 beams around the entire frame it appeared to have quite respectable resolution.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's not that it's old... it's that its' NOT new in any tangible way... no new tech , no new application, no real invention here.. which makes it pretty "meh" in perspective.
That this stuff has been sold commercially for decades is pretty damning in terms of this being a "So what? " news item.
1981 called... They want their technology back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Infrared
(and yes, for you xkcd fans, I did warn them about Haiti and Japan)
how is this a FORCE field?
Reminds me of the U-Force I got for the original NES - that was over 20 years ago! Still have it in its original box, actually. Maybe in another 25 years it'll be worth something... it certainly wasn't when it came out! It sorta worked for Punch-Out, and not at all for anything else.
I can't remember if the U-Force was what would now be called "multi-touch"... probably not. Didn't RTFA, but at any rate I assume (and would hope) the one in the article works a lot better!
In my local mall, during last christmas holiday, Disney set up an interactive display game to promote their wild-4-disney passes.
It consisted of multiple flat-screen tvs setup in a wall with an IR sensor setup in a field-sweep above the whole display. The point was to "drag" christmas ornaments to decorate the tree.
This is a similar tech with multi-touch.
They're using their grammar skills there.
you can use a webcam for free out of a dumpster and stick it in a light box like everyone else has been doing
cause those have been out for like what 60+ years
you have light on one end, photodetector on the other, there you made a force field here is some juice and a cookie, go play now
Ad-hominems don't exactly make your own position any stronger.
Technically, it's not an ad-hominem if you list the reason for the name-calling (which he did, beforehand). That said, Michael Kristopeit### is a known troll.
That sounds like a Plato IV terminal. They had that system in front of an orange plasma panel display. It wasn't as high a resolution as this, but the idea was the same. Worked fairly well, too.
Here's a picture of one.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Main feature of the HP-150.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
A Brief History of Pads, Part 2: Touch me!: "PLATO was a series of educational computer terminals that originated from the University of Illinois. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, PLATO contained many features that we take for granted today like e-mail, message boards and online tests. The fourth generation PLATO IV terminal featured a flat (and bright orange) plasma screen that students could touch to answer questions. The touch function was achieved by a series of infrared lights and receptors around the rim of the display. A finger would break a beam of light and trigger a touch."
Is Texas in Canada now?
Seen this a long time ago, at least 10 years ago. It was essentially a frame lined with IR sensors facing each other and tracking your hand movements and turned any flat panel display (such as a plasma TV) into a touchscreen surface. While it didn't do multi-touch, it was essentially the exact same concept
It might not work on the ocean floor either, but so what?
Fer chrissake, what did you invent today?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't let them bum you out; the slash in slashdot is more about cutting than sharpness...
It sounds like you did something pretty decent, and good luck with your studies. Stick to the low level/hardware interfacing side of the industry. Its a rich area with an increasing lack of expertise.
The Canadian government is owned by Texans; so no, Canada is in Texas now. We have our own mini GB, just lacking his likability and intelligence.
Disclaimer: I'm the guy in the video.
The big difference between what we're doing, and what's been done before, is that we are using one-to-many communication between emitters and sensors, as opposed to earlier systems, which use matched emitter/sensor pairs on opposite sides of the display to generate a series of parallel lines in both the x and y directions that can be interrupted.
By reading from a large number of sensors for each infrared emitter, we generate a dense mesh of infrared light beams, which is what enables the sensor to detect multiple touches. Prior infrared systems using parallel beams suffer from ghost touch ambiguities when multiple fingers are on the display. Ours does not. This is the big differentiator between what's been done before and what we've done.
Most SMART boards and other commercial multi-touch sensors, use two cameras in the corners of a screen (some use four), and computer vision algorithms to identify and track touches on the display. Our approach is different in that it generates a more complete visual hull of the interactive area than with these types of systems. Using two cameras means you can only reliably track two touches due to occlusion issues, whereas we can detect 20+ touchpoints with high reliability.
More info can be found on our website: http://ecologylab.net/zerotouch/
The publications at the bottom of the page should help slashdot readers understand the technical innovations a little bit better.
A lot of people seem to have missed the point here. Either that or the old sensors were cleverer than I thought. Anyhow, I like this approach, I wonder how well it copes with fingers bunched together looking like a single fat finger or whether it can still be confident that the finger it tracks out of a bunch is the same one it tracked going in without getting confused.
Nullius in verba
Plenty of touch overlays for larger screens used this technology, I have a stack of overlays for 32" panels that use IR like this. A much better options would be something like Next Window Overlays http://www.nextwindow.com/ They use a pair of 1 dimesional ir cameras and a bar of ir lights to triangulate objects in their field of view so by placing the cameras in the top two corners of the screen and the ir leds between them you can have a simple bar rather than a square frame like this thing. Mount a bunch of them on the ceiling next to each other and you'd have instant 3D multitouch
yeah this doesn't mean shit till apple creates it. Then everyone will jump on the bandwagon. Oh wait...
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
hogwash in computer years its a billion, its like the Greeks fighting with static electricity on their amber everything, then in 2011 some kids think "well duh we must have been so stupid to not think of a generator based on this concept of statk electricity!"
sounds like a high school 4 person group project in electronics class, oh wait we did a lower resolution version of this back in 1994 as a time killer semester, what "innovations" do we do now?
nasa plant seedlings and cockroach fucking in space? oh some dipshit found a use for a IR photo-transistor from radio shack? what's next? canned food? bandages?
for fucks sake America this is the best we have?
As a semi-professional cynic and the guy who tore into the Rice University students who's PR dept. claimed they had invented a revolutionary solution to a huge health problem, I had initially thought, as many here have claimed, that this IR-beam touch-screen frame was nothing new. However, I was also trained at one of the the EloGraphics plants (I can't remember where the heck it was now) on how to install and repair those old IR-beam touch screens. I also serviced several other makes of IR-beam touch screens when I was a technician at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles back in the late 1980s.
Those old IR-beam touch screens worked on a very basic principle. The beams went across the screen in a strict grid pattern of horizontal and vertical lines. Very simple hardware detected which horizontal beam and which vertical beam had been blocked and then reported a basic X-Y coordinate. This is why, as one commenter has mentioned, the data could be transmitted via serial connection. The data consisted of nothing but a series of coordinates.
The main thing that people complained about with this design was: If a user placed two fingers on the screen or laid their finger against the screen such that it blocked more than one horizontal and/or vertical beam, then the coordinate reported always indicated the top-most and left-most interrupted beams. There simply was no way to detect the correct position of more than one finger. This was because of the way the electronics were designed. The circuit simply polled each sensor in turn till it found the first blocked beam in each of the horizontal and vertical directions. Those sensor numbers were reported as the coordinates and the electronics reset and started polling from the top-left again. It seemed an intractable problem - at the time - to detect when fingers were blocking one horizontal beam but two vertical beams or any other combination other than just one of each.
Now, neither the article nor the video mentions it, but by looking carefully at the first few seconds of the video, one can see that this sensor array works in an entirely different way. It appears that they use - as they said - "thousands of beams" but not in a simple horizontal-vertical grid. Instead, they send them out at dozens of different angles from each of hundreds of points along the edge of the frame. Then by compiling the list of all the different beams that are blocked at any given time they can build up a picture of exactly where something is blocking all of those beams, no matter how big it is or how many there are. Again, take a close look at the video from seconds 3 - 6 and seconds 42 - 45. You will see them display "what the computer sees" represented by lines for each beam that isn't blocked and the blank space where no beams cross from any direction. It is almost like one of those lame string-art things we used to make in the 1970s, except you just put a string from every point to every point on the frame, then remove just enough to make some holes in the webbing.
I have to say, this is definitely a significant advance on what I know of the current technology. Now, it is possible - in the intervening 30 years - that other technologies have come up which used this multi-angle beam system. But I haven't seen any. And certainly none with the software behind it to sus out the full size and shape of each object blocking the beams.
"... because I don't know what a force field is. That's because I have never watched Star Trek. That's because I am not a geek. Please sleep with me."
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I'm just waiting for them to re-release paper tape, the light pen, drum memory, and the toggle switch programming interface. We could call them cellulose ray, light sabre, wisdom vortex, and direct binary injection respectively.
You mean they've re-invented the Theremin?
I bought a HP monitor about 3 months ago that does this. It's got two IR light plane generators in the top corners, and an IR detector array around the bottom and sides. It's multitouch and works great. And this technology DOES make multitouch cheaper. It was $100 less than the other capacitive multitouch displays in the same size.
I thought shields had to be dropped for phasers?
Hmmm...I don't see how this tech deals with occluded fingertips...
It only had about a 256 touch-point resolution (16x16), but IR sensors were
standard on most Plato terminals back at the U. of Ill. It had a few terminals scattered off campus, as far away as Hawaii, so would have qualified as one of the first nationwide 'network' systems.
Behind the touch grid was a 512x512 plasma display (monochrome) (didn't require refresh!).
The base system supported interactive chat (multi-person as well as two people), email, multi-user forums, per-user 'cookies', program-loadable fonts (designable by users or 'authors'.
All software was in 'Tutor', an English oriented language with power to do complex math as well as 2-D graphics. The terminals generally ran at serial-line speeds with most running in the 1200-2400 baud range. The CPU (most were CDC (Control Data) based mainframes that used a 60-bit word size.
They used them for instruction on the campus in CAI courses that taught everything from physics, to language, math, chemistry, and computer languages as well as some ultra cool cross-continent chat, forums, and 100+user games. A space-battle game (Empire) was probably the most popular with some DND type games following it. Had 3-D line-drawn mazes, multi-user parties....all running on a main frame! Would timeshare maybe 200-400 users depending on the mainframe (most running low-cpu interactive learning progs, which, of course, got highest priority over the games which ran in background.
They measured cpu time in "TIPS" Thousands of instructions/Second!
Nice that they've finally reinvented a 40 yr/old touch system! Hope they don't try for a patent! ;-)
At least they upped the resolution...
Eventually microcomputer based computers replaced the orange plasma displays, having the advantage of being able to run locally loaded 'script' ('u'Tutor) programs downloaded from the main 'web', er, mainframe which allowed fancier animation, among other things...(as well as the ability to write aids for some of the star-battle games).
Unlike slashdot, it could actually display a micro (u) sign without difficulty.
Why is slashdot so backward in not supporting UTF-8 or even archaic HTML entities? 40 year old plasma diplays could display the entire Greek alphabet, but slashdot? Bear skins and stone knives!
Point being that this exact tech *hasn't* been done before... it's based around an old technology, but throwing more processing power at it to achieve things that were not possible two decades ago.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The basic technology to do this has been around for ages. Maybe not the computational power to drive it, but definitely the underlying technology.
Yeah but since you call people idiots all the time I will boycott those sites.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
I agree. Maybe we should post a new article on /. Call it, oooh I dont know maybe something like, Are there any good discussion sites out there? Post them here and let's discuss their pros and cons.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.