Redmond, Washington — For those who exemplify the axiom that bigger is always better, and as a result struggle with the small size of the screen of their mobile device, your pain is shared. Now that the technology is moving forward at a much more rapid pace, the fact that we still need to type on small touch-screens tells us that something more is due soon. Software maker Microsoft’s Research unit is unveiling technology that turns any surface into a touchscreen at a user interface symposium this week in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Interestingly, the new application dubbed as OmniTouch, is a wearable system that allows users to interact with a multi-touch input on almost any surface as a touchscreen, according to a description on a Microsoft Research Web page.
In association with Microsoft, that is precisely what a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Interaction Institute have developed a new graphical user interface system that is a shoulder-mounted device called “OmniTouch,” can make any surface work as a touchscreen.
In addition, the system of OmniTouch also supports multi-touch input and the best part is that it can actually figure out whether the finger is just hovering somewhere or whether the user is actually clicking something.
OmniTouch allows any surface to be used as a touch screen. (Credit: Microsoft)
“We wanted to take advantage of the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” said Hrvoje Benko of the Natural Interaction Research group at Microsoft.
The system employs a laser-based pico projector and a short-range depth-sensing camera for taking 3D images, just like Microsoft Kinect to track what your fingers are doing, including typing and tapping the touchscreen, the shoulder-worn device can show the user interface on a surface–a wall, leg, arm, table and numerous other items into a touch screen. Once the camera and the projector are calibrated together, any surface can be manipulated by touch.
“The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smartphones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet computer. If we could appropriate these ad hoc surfaces in an on-demand way, we could deliver all of the benefits of mobility while expanding the user’s interactive capability,” added Benko.
“It is likely that anything you can do on today’s mobile devices, you will be able to do on your hand using OmniTouch,” said Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. The palm of the hand could be used as a phone keypad, or as a tablet for jotting down brief notes. Maps projected onto a wall could be panned and zoomed with the same finger motions that work with a conventional multitouch screen.
The camera is a prototype provided by PrimeSense. When the camera and projector are fine-tuned with each other, the user can don the system and begin using it, Microsoft said.
Moreover, the new OmniTouch system is capable of recognizing multi touch, and the researchers have shown the system responds well even with two points of contact (two fingers). The way this system senses the motion of your finger is simply amazing because it registers the finger equivalent of cursor control as well, something we don’t have in touchscreens so far.
Apparently, a consumer-friendly system would not require the bulky apparatus that only a card-carrying propeller-head would be brazen enough to wear in public.
The project is being initiated during UIST 2012, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, being held October 16-19 in Santa Barbara, Calif.
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