aleks vasic wrote:
> Yeah, because obviously this technology wont get pushed any further, or
> refined, and will stay bulky and cumbersome. No potential whatsoever.
> Its all just a gimmick.
>
> On a more serious note i think you have a serious deficiency when it
> comes to foresight.
actually, having developed and built this kind of technology myself,
here's the deal:
it works using a phenomenon called Frustrated Total Internal Reflection.
You shine a lot of infrared light onto the edges of a piece of glass,
and the light bounces around inside the sheet of glass, without any
getting out. When a finger touches one side of the glass, this causes
light to bounce back out of the other side of the glass behind where the
finger pressed. Put an IR camera with in a position where it can see the
entire back surface of glass, and do some blob tracking, and you've got
yourself a multitouch interface. It's pretty simple really.
Problem is, you need a camera to be able to see the entire back surface
of the screen. Which means you need heaps of clear space behind the
scene.. Plus since it's rear-projection, you also need enough space
behind it to install a projecter. Without significantly altering the
laws of physics I can't see this changing too rapidly, unless we figure
out how to build enormous (and I mean enormous) CCD's.
IMO the big deal about the Jeff Han stuff is the software, not the
hardware. What's more, look closely at the video, too, and you'll notice
that, actually, the multi-touch enabled stuff is only really used for
zooming. Almost everything else on the video would be possible with a
single-touch interface.
--
Damian Stewart
+64 27 305 4107
f r e y
live music with machines
http://www.frey.co.nz
http://www.myspace.com/freyed
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