Disney Research: Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids and Everyday Objects. Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects. Tablet-like touch interface comes to everyday objects. Researchers have developed a way to take the multitouch interface of tablets and smartphones to a whole new level and set of objects.
Disney Research in Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University yesterday announced a touch interface technology called Touche that brings a new set of gestures to existing touch screens and can make anything from table tops to body parts computer input devices. It could lead to a "smart doorknob" that unlocks when grasped a certain way, or a couch that turns on the TV when a person sits down and turns off when the person falls asleep. The technology will also allow people to add new inputs to smartphones by pinching the front and back of the device. Touche can also make the body an input device, allowing people to hold their fingers up to their lips to turn music off on their digital-music players.
Existing capacitive touch screens operate by the changes a person's finger makes on the patterns of electric charge on a screen. Disney Research invents amazing new touch sensing tech. We were only barely aware that Disney Research even existed, but entirely out of left field it's come up with a simple yet sophisticated implementation of capacitive touch sensing that's one of the coolest tech demos we've seen in a very long time.
It's not terribly hard to endow an object with touch sensing capability: you just rig up a wire to it, apply a small voltage, and then when someone touches the object, the capacitance changes and you can tell. What Disney Research (in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University) has done that's so clever is to use a "novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique" that monitors many different signal frequencies at the same time. Since the tissues in your body all have different capacitive properties, paying attention to all those different frequencies makes it possible to tell what part (or parts) of the body are being used and even how they're moving. This even works with liquids (!) Disney bringing touch controls to body parts, water, more. New technology delivers smarter touchscreens. Intelligent doorknobs and gesture-controlled smartphones could be on the way, thanks to a new sensing technique developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.
Touché is a form of capacitive touch sensing like that used in most smartphone touchscreens used in most smartphones - but capable of sensing capacitive signals across a broad range of frequencies, not just one. This so-called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS) means a device knows not only when it is being touched, but to recognize complex configurations of the hand or body that is doing the touching. It only needs one sensing electrode, and the object itself can serve as a sensor - even the human body or a body of water.
"Signal frequency sweeps have been used for decades in wireless communication, but as far as we know, nobody previously has attempted to apply this technique to touch interaction," says Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research. Disney Technology Turns Everything into a Touch Device. You're already used to touch-enabled PCs, tablets, and smartphones, but eventually almost everything in your house could have a touch sensor, including doorknobs, cereal bowls, sofas, water, and even your own body.
That's a reality scientists at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -- part of the Walt Disney Company's commercial research arm -- are working toward with a new touch and gesture recognition platform called Touché. The new technology relies on “swept frequency capacitive sensing” capable of processing far more information than current touch sensors that monitor a single frequency to detect single and multiple finger movements. Touché can monitor multiple frequencies, allowing it to understand hand grasps, complex finger gestures, and body position such as when a user is covering her ears or uses his elbows to lean on a table. Another novel capability of Touché is turning water into a touch surface.
One Per Cent: Touché brings touch control to everyday things. Jacob Aron, technology reporter Forget smartphones or tablets - the future of touch control could be doorknobs, furniture or even your own body.
OmniTouch. Today’s mobile computers provide omnipresent access to information, creation and communication facilities.
It is undeniable that they have forever changed the way we work, play and interact. However, mobile interaction is far from solved. Diminutive screens and buttons mar the user experience, and otherwise prevent us from realizing their full potential. We explored and prototyped a powerful alternative approach to mobile interaction that uses a body-worn projection/sensing system to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides. For example, the surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phone. OmniTouch - Demo Video - ACM UIST 2011.