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Microsoft Buys Multi-Touch Pioneer Perceptive Pixel
theodp writes "Back in 2006, a post on Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology — a real TED crowd-pleaser — gave Slashdot readers a taste of the iPhone and iPad future. Han spun off his NYU Research into a company called Perceptive Pixel which, among other things, gave the world CNN's Amazing Magic Wall. On Monday, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft is acquiring Perceptive Pixel, which not only means you'll be able to run Windows 8 on an 82-inch touchscreen, but that the Apple v,. Motorola Mobility lawsuit is about to get more interesting!"
If by "more interesting" you mean "more tedious, unnecessary and annoying", then yes, yes it will.
I use my Tablet PC comfortably cradled in one arm, or propped comfortably on a table or desk.
For the tactile feedback, there're a number of companies working on this, most recent I came across:
http://senseg.com/technology/senseg-technology
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Who took them away from you? There's plenty of phones with buttons, plenty of feature phones, and if you really want to get medieval, you can even find phones that can barely text. How about you stop trying to stifle things you don't understand?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Microsoft have never got this, and they probably never will. First they tried to turn phones into Windows desktops with a start button, now they're trying to turn Windows into a smartphone.
Haven't Microsoft figured out yet that humans need tactile feedback for any kind of prolonged operation, and aren't designed for holding our hands out from our body?
I take it you aren't a teacher. I write on a 200 inch vertical surface with no tactile feedback for 2 hours at a time. This thing would be amazing in my classroom.
No, no, no. You got it all wrong. Apple comes up with a space-age idea like multi-touch, waits for somebody intelligent to invent it and THEN claims it as their own and sues the little upstart back into the stone age. The mistake everybody makes is that just because somebody else actually put the pieces together and did the hard work doesn't mean they invented it. To invent something, you have to think about it and then patent the thought you had with some rough scribbles on a napkin. I've actually invented and patented hovercars. I'm just waiting for somebody else to make them so that I can sue them.
It's kind of brilliant. Y'know, in a total bastard kind of way.
The original patents on multi-touch belonged to a company founded back in 1998 called Fingerworks. Fingerworks produced multi-touch keyboards and gesture pads for the Macintosh.
Here is an article from 2002 discussing one of their products in the NY Times.
Apple purchased Fingerworks a year before Jeff Han's now famous TED talk.
Or a really big cat toy :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Cause no one else would fail to see that using multi-touch on an 84" screen means waving both arms around.
Yeah, I'm failing to see that, especially since I'm watching it in use and don't see the guy waving around both arms. With your use of the word "waving" you're trying to convey this wild flailing motion, but the actual interaction with the device seems as natural as what I would do on a chalk board.
Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch.
I want it for presentations, training sessions and so on.
It would be trivially easy to launch an on-screen keyboard or keypad when needed.
I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs.
Tech like this is shared like a photocopier and is not your personal, private, playground.
The original patents on multi-touch belonged to a company founded back in 1998 called Fingerworks
That's interesting, since actual multitouch systems predate Fingerworks by almost 2 decades.
Here's an example of the pinch gesture being used in 1988: http://youtu.be/dmmxVA5xhuo?t=4m32s
Why isn't Apple suing every phone manufacturer in existence? I'm quite sure Apple doesn't want its acquired patents to face their day in court.
Wait, "Perceptive Pixel" is not an Ubuntu release?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You know how I can tell you didn't read the patents?
I owned one of the FingerWorks keyboards. Their gesture-recognition technology seemed like it had been reverse-engineered from UFOs, or brought back by a time-traveler from the far future. It was enormously more advanced than the work Buxton cites, not to slight Bill in any way (he was a big influence on my own doctoral work in HCI).
I only hope that Microsoft does a better job of popularizing Han's advanced features. Apple still has barely begun to exploit the good parts of FingerWorks' gestural technology. (Can I at least get some two- and three-finger gestures to do usable text selection and editing commands?)
30+ small children in a class is too many for effective learning
So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
Actually, when I was a grad student at NYU in 2002, when Jeff started there, he wasn't paid or funded at all. He wasn't a student, and didn't even have an office. He was just there for fun.
From what I recall, Jeff made a decent amount of money right out of college in the dot-com boom (I think it was with CUSeeMe, an early teleconference software). After cashing that out just in time, he didn't need to work, from what I gathered, so he just was looking for a place to hang out around other interesting people doing graphics research. So he got in touch with one of the professors, and they let him hang out at what was then the "Center for Advanced Technologies" (since long defunct). All of his work was self-funded. Like I said, he didn't even have an office; he worked at the public terminals in the middle of the lab floor after everyone else left for the day.
Maybe that changed at some point later (I left after a year), but I suspect he probably brought in far more funding (or at least positive publicity) than he ever used.