Disney researchers put gesture recognition in door knobs, chairs, fish tanks. Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob.
Or a smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it. A team of researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition. Your smartphone works thanks to capacitive coupling. How the Internet Gets Inside Us. When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched.
And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far.
Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” They whisper. A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization. Consumer Innovation as New Economic Pattern. Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology.