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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!
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
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
I think you're right. It's just OK. Watching the video on the disney research link, you can see the signal that they're measuring. It appears that they can detect the amount of touch (one finger, two fingers, your whole palm), but not much more subtle than that. If you ever messed around with a multi-meter as a kid on Resistance mode, you probably did much the same thing. The summary makes it seem like the system would be capable of distinguishing a lot of different features. Really, it appears (from the video) that it would probably be just as happy to see you put your fingers to your forehead as your lips (and that's assuming you have electrodes strapped to your ear and your wrist, based on the hand-touching demonstration.
In short, IMHO, this looks like a potential evolutionary change for some applications, but not the revolution the summary seems to promise. You're not going to be playing charades so you can use Siri without talking...
Disney walking brooms is to touchscreens ?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, finally sensory feedback from a computer during sex with my wife to let me know if I'm doing it right or not.
"A little lower, honey."
"No, honey. I should be 2.6mm to the left."
Finally, an interface that lets us turn women on.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This is not that.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
You mean like a paper screen, or a wind screen, smoke screen, genetic screen, mechanical screen, or naval screen?
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 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.
Yes, your wife has quite the doorknobs...
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
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.
They licked what?
it will be Mickey Mouse when they apply the Sonny Bono copyright act (aka the "Mickey Mouse law") to patents to protect this.
I think h meant: Didn't Microsoft develop something that lykd ass....
Maybe he's typing on one of the new nokia phones.