$5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from ExtremeTech: "Researchers at the University of Washington's aptly named Ubiquitous Computing Lab can turn any LCD monitor in your house into a touchscreen, with nothing more than a $5 sensor that plugs into the wall and some clever software." The system works by measuring changes that your hand creates in the electromagnetic signature of the monitor. Surprisingly, it offers some pretty fine-grained detection, too: "full-hand touch, five-finger touch, hovering above the screen, pushing, and pulling." The "$5 sensor" part is mostly theoretical for now to those of us who don't live in a lab, though; on the other hand, "co-author Sidhant Gupta tells Technology Review that the $5 sensor uses off-the-shelf parts, and the algorithms are included in the paper, so it would be fairly easy for you — or a commercial entity — to recreate the uTouch system."

Comments

chance for microsoft

[postmortem]

Because otherwise nobody would pay extra for a touch screen PC with Windows 8

The LCD monitor will make a lousy touchscreen

[fustakrakich]

It's not really designed to have your finger smashing against it. It better have a hard surface.

Re:The LCD monitor will make a lousy touchscreen

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of things can be responsive to having a finger mashed against them and not sustain damage, even if they are soft and unprotected with a hard shell.

Just ask your girlfriend.

Re:The LCD monitor will make a lousy touchscreen

[OhSoLaMeow]

Some of things can be responsive to having a finger mashed against them and not sustain damage, even if they are soft and unprotected with a hard shell.

Just ask your girlfriend.

Think again about where you're posting this.

Two words

[hugortega]

Gorilla Arm ... Well, more ... Why people still believe that desktop computers are good as a touch device? That makes no sense for me, specially because the ugly fingerprints hehe. I love to *work* on my dual head desktop because the speed of keyboard and big resolution. If I have to use a touch device, it's not for work and not on a desktop, really. Anyway, nice research, I have to say.

Cost

[Arkiel]

5$ sensor. $2,500 software license.

Re:i prefer

[Spy Handler]

I just touched my 27 inch LCD monitor and it was a bad experience. The screen looked like it deformed and pushing liquid to the side. Plus it left a greasy fingerprint. I wouldn't buy this thing for $5 or 5 cents.

Keep your greasy fingers off my matte screen...

[dargaud]

...or I WILL punch you in the mouth. It's impossible to clean it up completely. Nor do I want to.

Re:Touch screen or big button?

[theIsovist]

I was fortunate enough to see all the work that these guys are pursuing (there's some really fun energy monitoring that they've developed, using only a single device to monitor a whole house). From what it sounds like, the sensing systems are very low resolution, useful for exactly what you said. Is something there and how big is it? As the system is just noticing a flux in energy when your hand interacts with the field given off by the monitor, they (when they spoke with us a few months ago) said it seemed unlikely.

Fun fact though, they've used the same technology to monitor the fields generated by the lights in a room, so you can actually gain a picture of movement in the room based off of only the flux in the lights' power draws. Again, this is very low resolution, but you don't always need every system to be high res.

Add an extra $5 straightaway

[caspy7]

...for the screen cleaner & cloth that comes with it.