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Monday, September 25, 2006

Multi-Touch Sensing

The light table of the future....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to Y.N.

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...: Awesome, there definitely is a market, but the question is when will it be released. It seems like one of those eternal "in five years" advents that recede Zeno-like the closer you think you get to them. I personally cannot see it coming into main stream use for close to a decade, due to the unbelievable inertia of conventional User Interface and the extreme slowness with which OS makers adopt UI technology (I mean, as anybody who has to squint to see the icons and text on their high-res screens will tell you, MS and Apple have both yet to fully integrate vector graphics into their user interfaces even though high-resolution large screens have been around for nearly 10 years.)

Also, there is a very serious RSI problem with this tech. What do you do about your palms? I can't imagine keeping my arms raised for minutes, much less hours.; 12:23 PM
Brambor said...: Thank you for the link. Very cool.; 2:02 PM
Ken Tanaka said...: Like so many new technologies this looks "very cool" and it certainly has many potential practical applications. But its practicality does have some immediately imaginable boundaries. For example it does not seem to be an interface that might easily facilitate applications where precision is required. Its usability would also seem to depend on the size of the display. The panel that the demonstrator was using appeared larger than my 30" Apple Cinema display...that's quite large!

I can say one thing: this would be a real boon for the glass cleaner market.; 3:35 PM
Mike Johnston said...: Hi Ken,
It didn't look like glass to me. It's pressure sensitive, right?

--Mike; 4:27 PM
Anonymous said...: The touch panel is acrylic, but it doesn't really detect pressure in the traditional sense. Look here: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/; 5:33 PM
Ken Tanaka said...: Indeed, it's probably a plastic membrane over the actual screen...but Windex makes life possible. ;-); 6:30 PM