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Disney Research Can Turn Nearly Any Surface Into a Touch Screen
surewouldoutlaw writes "Remember that scene in Fantasia where Mickey turns all the brooms into an army of workers? Well, Disney isn't quite there, yet. But scientists with the company's research lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have been able to turn virtually any surface, including liquid water and the human body, into a multi-touch interface. The new system is called Touché, and it is as awesome as it sounds."
No baby! Honest it's a touch screen. Try it out.. Yeah.. You just have to rub a little harder.. Harder!
Didn't microsoft already develop something lyk dis?
And it sounds okay!
Is this a joke? Because I was thinking I'd see some cool video, and instead, I saw some sort of Pavlovian training of children to eat cereal with a spoon, and not chopsticks. WTF?
... right out of the gate
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
wish upon a star.
The human body already has the ability to detect multiple touches at once and react to them.
The device can detect the _way_ tou touch it (one finger, complete hand, ...) but not _where_ you touch it, so it's not a touchscreen per se, more of a more-intelligent touch switch. I admire the way they made it from fairly simple components: I built my own prototype working in the same fashion in about one evening after reading their docs: http://spritesmods.com/?art=engarde
The technology is cool and all, but a touch "screen" detects where you are touching it - this detects only that you are touching an object, not where (though as shown it does detect how it's being touched).
The examples they give are pretty contrived but I'm sure there could be some good uses that come from it. One I can think of right away would be making current touch lamp switches more accurate, right now you just turn them on/off if you brush against them. It would be nicer if they needed a grasp or multiple fingers to turn them on/off.
It has the same problem as all gesture based systems though, the difficulty of discovering what the interface does... even touch controlled lamps have that issue, people can spend a while looking for a switch before they figure out they can just touch the body of the lamp.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Am I the only one who smiled when the video was demonstrating pinching, grasping and touching which seemingly looked like a nipple
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Sounds a little mickey mouse to me....
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Doesn't the name "touch screen" imply a display?
Disney walking brooms is to touchscreens ?
love is just extroverted narcissism
IBM used to had a touchscreen monitor that used pressure sensors in the base to determine where the screen was being pressed.
Is this how the Virgin Alarm in Spaceballs worked?
First I read "liquid water IN the human body".
Sorry, but with a statement like "The new system is called Touché, and it is as awesome as it sounds.", they damn well better be saying that with a french accent, otherwise it just sounds a whole helluva lot like "douche"... so the 'awesomeness' of how it sounds can be two entirely different extremes here.
Observe how he didn't use a Mac for the demo.
Finally, an interface that lets us turn women on.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/04/mogees
With some type of triangulation you should be able to determine location too I would think.
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I have been waiting for this kind of thing for decades. I mean, ffs, it's the new millenium, past 2010 even, and we don't have replicants or HAL9000 computers or flying cars or hotels orbiting Jupiter. We don't even have a moonbase or space elevator to help get us there. No affordable household robots or holodecks or brain recording and playback devices. No ubiquitous true 3D hologram devices. No affordable head mounted displays for VR. It just doesn't feel like the future yet.
But this technology is more like it. If/when this becomes affordable commercial tech I'll definitely be in line for one. Those of you who are seeing this as merely an improved touchscreen I think are missing the point. This is Future Tech.
Did an alien spaceship land at Disney or something? I mean, Disney of all people. It would be bizarre if almost immediately after this invention they come up with a small fusion reactor, a warp drive engine, anti-gravity boots, artificial animals, and direct brain to computer interfaces with the ability to record and playback thoughts and emotions.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I would think the downfall of a system like this is that it would require user training for each and every gesture. Certainly, humans of different ages and hand sizes would have different capacitive properties to their hands. I'm sure other factors like body hair, perspiration, skin tone or texture, etc. probably have some affect.
If training WASN'T required, I could see Disney using this in their theme parks. Especially in the little kids rides and houses in Mickey's Toon Town. Imagine the surprise on your four-year-old's face when the fake plastic props start interacting with them in interesting ways.
I'm pretty certain training would be a requirement though. And alas, you aren't going to get a four-year-old to sit through a calibration session.
Maybe this has better applications for the deaf or blind as a more precise haptic interface to other devices.
I think the most interesting part of this article for me is that Disney has a research arm. I didn't know or even think about that before seeing this. I took a look at the site and it seems like they do some cool stuff. They have locations near some major universities and in Zurich. Seems like it would be a good place to work.
K Man
The article says nothing about how they trained their software. Is it person-specific? I suspect that the sensor response from different people gripping the same doorknob can be quite different. Same due to sweating, dehydration, dirty hands, etc.
"Check out our new touch-recognizing doorknob! Training times may vary. We don't advise to put it on the bathroom door for at least a week after the purchase."
I so want this so I can turn my kitchen table into a giant touchscreen for D&D games! Would make the battles soooooooooooooo much faster!
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So somebody else correct me if I'm wrong here, but on a dramatic number of their demonstrations it looked like they didn't have much more data than the amount my which their curve was shifted -- only in a few instances did it really change shape dramatically.
Moreover, it appeared as if the amount of the shift of the curve was directly proportional to how much the object was being touched. Part of me wonders if they were really essentially calibrating these "gestures" based upon the amount of contact with the device in question. E.g., two fingers will of course result in more contact than one, but less than an entire palm. The whole "we can detect how the object is being grasped" thing seemed contrived.
Not that it wasn't cool -- there are definitely uses for this -- but it doesn't seem to me like they're getting quite as much data as they seem to be implying.
I tried one in my living/dining area. It got stuck under the dining room table amongst the chair/table legs, and it got hung up on the living room rug.
And I gotta say, I think it's a Mickey Mouse®© solution.
If the makers of Real Dolls aren't investigating this at this very moment, they're doing it wrong.
Disney is one of the worst examples of Corporate Morals that comes to mind. For a good read, try "the mouse that roared". Things do not bode well for this technology given its owner.
How is this Disney thing any different from that?
It's really similar, the lamp switches you mentioned basically work the same way.
The advancement here is that it measures a sweeping range of frequencies over time, so it can have profiles for different ways something is touched (grasping, one finger, two finger) since they all change the response the sensor gets back.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My associates would like to know, whether these touchscreens have, by any chance, rounded corners..
Yes, but the iPod can't detect when you are touching your body, and react.
Neither the author nor the submitter RTFA when they developed the title - it clearly states that surfaces must be conductive, which is an awfully long way from "anything". The article even mentions smart couches, but then goes on to say saying workarounds are required - non-conductive items must be coated with something conductive.
Stupid non-tech journalists writing tech articles.
The real patentable thing here is the multi-frequency touch sensor itself... the uses that spring from it should not be patentable...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I can just see someone writing don't touch this onto a wet surface and every fool and his dog touching it!!!
... just got a whole new meaning.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html
Mickey created just the one "broom golem." But then he found there was no way to stop it. So, he tried chopping it up. Then the pieces of the the broom turned into an army of "Broom Golems" that he still couldn't control.
It was all quite horrifying really... not something you'd want to replicate in real life...
Well, I mean I would, but that's because I'm quite mad, you see... hahaha... hehe... HAHAHAHA...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."